Work — 01
Reducing repetitive price-sourcing work while making checks, challenges, and team knowledge easier to reuse.
The operating environment
The pricing day started early and moved quickly. The team sourced, validated, and challenged prices across large volumes of financial instruments under tight morning deadlines.
Fixed-income sourcing depended heavily on manual work across multiple market-data sources. The process was repetitive, time-sensitive, and vulnerable to errors when information had to be retrieved, entered, checked, and rechecked by hand.
What I changed
I automated parts of fixed-income price sourcing so prices could be pulled in bulk rather than retrieved instrument by instrument.
I added checks around the automated workflows so reducing manual work did not mean reducing scrutiny.
The checks helped surface exceptions for review instead of depending on repeated manual inspection.
Pricing questions often required research before a price could be accepted or challenged. I created a shared tracker so once a question had been researched and resolved, the reasoning could be reused instead of rediscovered.
From personal shortcuts to team infrastructure
I shared workflows, controls, shortcuts, and process improvements with the wider team so useful changes became part of how the work could be done, rather than staying personal workarounds.
Measurable change
Automating repetitive sourcing steps substantially reduced the time required for the targeted workflow.
Reducing repeated manual handling also led to materially fewer errors in the automated workflow.
What this work taught me
The useful automation was not the automation that removed people from the process. It was the automation that removed repetitive work while making the places that still required judgment easier to see.
The change
Less time spent retrieving information.More structure around where human judgment was still needed.