Witad Awards 2022: Risk professional of the year—Hazal Kurtcu, Citadel Securities

In her 2.5 years at Citadel Securities, Hazal Kurtcu has become a change agent in shaping the firm’s risk management operations. As a risk associate, she is responsible for overseeing the firm’s middle-office functions across equities and over-the-counter (OTC) trading.

Over the last 12 to 15 months, in partnership with the compliance and tech teams, Kurtcu has assisted in guiding the re-architecture, design and implementation of Citadel Securities’ enhanced trade reporting systems and processes, to increase firm visibility and further reduce latency of trade reporting.

Kurtcu says the platform enhancements helped the firm manage last year’s unprecedented market volatility and trading volumes, driven by meme stocks.

“It was a challenging time in the retail space, and the infrastructure and our new dynamic framework definitely put us at an advantage,” Kurtcu says.

As part of this tech revamp, she and her risk management team helped to scrutinize the firm’s post-trade reporting capabilities and workflows. Following the tech assessment, the different teams worked together to migrate Citadel Securities’ trade reporting function to a completely new architecture. The business effort also included moving internal client flows away from legacy systems to the more scalable tech platform.

Kurtcu says the new system brings together the various post-trade data sources onto one holistic user interface (UI). The UI tool is designed to allow compliance and risk management teams to identify and troubleshoot potential trading issues and latencies more clearly in real time. This is done by displaying the firm’s reporting data at different phases along its lifecycle. In turn, Kurtcu says this has helped to carve out inefficiencies and processing costs.

“By creating a one-stop-shop interface and framework it provided us the ability to reduce our outstanding trade reporting exceptions, and it also gave us the advantage of increasing our reporting timeliness,” she says.

The re-architecture kicked off in the first quarter of 2020, and it’s been an “action packed” 15 months since then, Kurtcu says, whereby the different teams made additional enhancements to the platform, beyond the original design. “It was a collaborative team effort and it put us in a better position than where we were at the beginning of the year in 2020,” she says.

Citadel Securities is now looking to apply the new trade reporting framework to other parts of the business and other asset classes.