“I wanted to be a concert pianist. For as long as I remember, that was my passion from the very beginning,” Michael Chin smiles.
The CEO of Duco speaks with the rhythm and intensity of a great concert performer as we take a seat in the data automation platform provider’s London office.
Chin has only been in London for a few days and he is jetting off again to the company’s office in Poland that night. It is a busy life leading a company, but it might not have been this way had he followed his early dreams.
“When I graduated, I had no intention of going into financial services. I thought I was going to go to New York, become a starving musician. But then reality struck, and I thought, ‘how am I ever going to make any money doing this?’” he laughs.
Chin may have studied a music major at Carnegie Mellon University, but he was developing a growing interest in technology and computer science. His final thesis centred around his two great interests, the interlocked nature of music and creativity with science.
Upon his epiphany, Chin decided to enter the J.P. Morgan training programme. What he discovered when he joined offered a comforting surprise. “I thought I would be surrounded by economic majors and finance majors but they weren’t. There were computer science majors, engineers, philosophy majors, history majors,” he says.
13 years later, and Chin was well and truly ingrained in J.P. Morgan and the financial services space.
Tech takeover
“I started my career as a trader in New York at J.P. Morgan, and I really was very lucky to spend 13 years as a trader covering all asset classes,” he continues. “I moved to Tokyo for a little while to run the business out there, then back to New York to run the commodity derivatives trading business, and then moved to Singapore and Hong Kong to do that for a while.”
Chin explains that this was at a time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when almost all trading processes were completed manually. But, with mobile phones and electronic trading beginning to become more common, Chin was excited for what was to come.
“I started to get really interested in the different ways that we can leverage technology to trade more efficiently,” he explains. An interest which spurred him to co-found TradingScreen, a buy-side trading tool designed to help traders.
“We grew an amazing company over the course of 10 years,” he remembers. “But, I left there to go and be CEO of Mantara, another trading technology firm, and then I took over the trading business at Thomson Reuters, later Refinitiv. I immediately plunged myself into a massive organisation.”
It was a plunge that did not really suit Chin who had grown an affection for building smaller businesses from the ground up.
“I really, really wanted to go back to where my heart is, back at a smaller company. I came upon Broadway Technology and sold it to Bloomberg quite quickly. I had every intention of staying at Bloomberg and seeing the integration out,” he says. “But other opportunities were coming my way. I was sick and tired of doing front office trading technology.”
One of those opportunities was Duco. Chin explains that he had considerable respect for Northern Capital, the company’s primary investor, and was incredibly excited about the prospect of joining a fast-growing back-office-focused technology company. It was an opportunity he could not turn away.
“It really opened my thinking to a whole world of where technology and innovation are really happening,” he says wide-eyed.
The workforce of the future
“I couldn’t believe it when I joined in February [2024], I saw 40 customers within a month and I was surprised to still see how manually intensive the reconciliation process was,” Chin says of the moment he knew the potential impact Duco could have on the post-trade space.
However, there was still work to be done and the new CEO was determined to create the best product for the industry. He explains: “What I really strongly believe in is everything is about the product. It seems so obvious, but it’s a state of mind.
“When you become a product-led organisation, all the decisions you make are from a product perspective. It helps focus on building exactly what the market and the customer needs, as opposed to creating what some might think are cool projects.”
One of Duco’s underlying principles is to help develop a modern workforce for the industry. He believes that the key to nurturing and allowing the best talent to thrive is by maintaining their focus on value added tasks, rather than mundane manual processing.
“We want to create the ‘workforce of the future’. Clients want to bring in smart engineers and business analysts, people that, frankly, can do much better than doing just simple manual tasks,” he adds. “It gives the capacity to focus on the things that really bring value and are more interesting for the employees.”
Duco focuses on data automation, which Chin bemoans as “one of the most overused terms”, and how artificial intelligence (AI) can shape a modern workflow.
“We leverage data through AI capabilities, and bring in unstructured data into the reconciliation process,” he explains. “Data automation is helping to create workflows that allow employees to focus on high value tasks by leveraging machine learning, large language models, and AI.”
Chin’s belief in his company pulses as he exults in how “we’re built from the ground up to be fully cloud-native SaaS.
“If you think about those legacy technologies and if you think about our competitors, none of [whom] have done this in the cloud, they cannot keep up with the pace of innovation. We can roll out new agents. We can upgrade and update the AI engines. Legacy technology needs a software release. That’s why being cloud native makes us so special.”
One of the dominating discussion points across asset servicing is whether the industry is capable of reaching and then maintaining the speed required to reach intraday, or even instant, settlement.
Chin believes: “Legacy technology does not have the ability to be able to adapt that quickly to meet T+1 because it is, by definition, not agile.
“We’re built to move at pace and we are T+1 ready for all our customers. But the challenge is, not everyone is ready. We have our set up and we’re driving this faster than others can keep up to integrate.”
The North Star
Chin sees a power in diversity. “You can train people to be traders, but bringing together a diverse group of people who think differently, problem solve differently, that’s really where the magic is,” he says.
Seeing the benefits of creating a team built with contrasting attitudes and voices from his early years as a trader at J.P. Morgan helped establish a belief Chin holds very close.
He says: “I took that diversity of thought philosophy all through my career. That is my North Star. You bring smart people together with different backgrounds, and you create an amazing place to work.”
Putting aside the financial and reputational growth of Duco, Chin takes deep pride in the work environment he has helped shape in his time as CEO.
“I am most proud that I have been able to take and maintain this incredible culture that was built by our founder, but put my mark on it,” he says.
He continues to insist that, “bringing in new talent and bringing that diversity of thought from different walks of life and educational backgrounds can only help bring a very special culture to the organisation.”
Chin’s captivating passion for leadership and Duco is paramount, it has taken over his life and our conversation. But, there is one source of lingering passion that is missing.
There is a tinge of regret in Chin’s voice as he mourns his lost dream. “Not playing the piano anymore is very frustrating. It’s very sad. I don’t have the time and if you don’t have the time, you don’t make the time,” he sighs.
Yet, the art of creativity still lives on in his spirit at work. He may not play the piano as much as he would like anymore, but, he adds: “I still have that creative vision and as a musician at heart, it just opens up this different part of your brain that is always going to be there to use.”
← Previous interview
SEB
Agnese Lange
Next interview →
AccessFintech
Roy Saadon
Image: Duco 
.jpg)