Employee Spotlight: LeAnne Branch, Customer Integration Engineer, New York

Our employee spotlight series highlights our people spanning many different roles, teams and geographies—each with a unique perspective to share. We chatted with LeAnne, a member of our Customer Integration team in New York, who loves the "solving mysteries" aspect of her role. Read on to see what she's referring to!

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What is your role at MarketAxess?

Customer Integration helps get clients set up with Financial Information eXchange (FIX) sessions (more on what this is here), so they can communicate with our system electronically. It may seem intimidating at first because the messages look like a bunch of numbers and equal signs put together, but there is a method to the madness! Many online FIX dictionaries do exist that will help you 'decode' the meanings of the tags and their values. We walk the client through our expected system behavior and test with them before setting sessions up in Production.

Why did you say "yes" to joining us?

The vibe! MarketAxess is definitely not a place where people are carbon-copies of each other. Everyone is so interesting and has a lot going on outside of just work. And even during work we tend to make things fun and interesting here.

What is your favorite part about your job?

Solving mysteries! My team hears me say this a lot, but we really are like Sherlock Holmes at times. Figuring out why a certain tag or value was sent via FIX requires a mix of industry knowledge and MarketAxess system knowledge, so we have to combine the two and figure things out. It's always nice to have a Eureka moment after working on a tough problem for a bit.

What keeps you working at MarketAxess?

The nice feedback we get from dealers and clients is really rewarding, particularly if the project is really complex. Sometimes we have to implement three or more FIX session types for a dealer or client at once and to receive emails where people are thanking you and telling you that you did a great job is really awesome.

What is your proudest moment here?

I received a 'great job' email that went to some very senior people around here and that really made my day. I felt like I was just doing my job in the moment, but for that to have had such a profound impact on volume and the relationship with that particular client was amazing.

How would you describe our culture?

Innovative. There is definitely the feeling in the air that we are always moving forward.

What makes someone who works at MarketAxess successful?

Just be helpful! We have many ways to communicate with each other, but that's for a reason. Whenever someone reaches out, I try to get them some information or direct them to someone who knows the material really well. It's all a matter of doing your best to make everyone else's job easier.

What is something you wish people knew about working at MarketAxess?

We do get to have fun even though we are in the financial industry! It's all a matter of envisioning what you are working on as some sort of puzzle to solve. Despite coming across many difficult issues, there's always a lighthearted Teams call to be had where you actually end up getting to the bottom of things.

Want to work with LeAnne? Explore our available opportunities here.