Meet Nateq Minar, the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Quant FinTech Ltd, a fintech company based in Bangladesh with offices in UAE, Malaysia, and Canada that specializes in providing cutting-edge fintech solutions to clients worldwide. Nateq is a highly skilled and experienced financial technologist who has been involved in the development of some of the most innovative financial products and services in recent times.
With a background in Engineering, MBA, Finance and a passion for technology, Nateq has been able to bridge the gap between these two fields to create unique solutions that have revolutionized the financial industry. In this interview, we will delve into Nateq’s journey as a fintech entrepreneur, his challenges, and his vision for the future of fintech. Let’s get to it.
What’s the idea behind Your Company?
We founded our company, Quant FinTech Ltd., to disrupt the global financial markets with cutting-edge financial technologies that provide innovative solutions to current market participants. Our goal is to make premium trading technology accessible and affordable to people all over the world, particularly those in developing nations.
How did you begin your career journey? Do you have some advice for beginners?
I’m a passionate entrepreneur and engineer with a career spanning back to 2005 in the IT industry. Over time, I have become a serial entrepreneur involved in diverse business ventures across the UAE, Malaysia, Canada, and Bangladesh. My belief in human advancement through technology and global interactions drives my aim to build a brighter, more sustainable future. With over 18 years of professional experience in sectors including IoT, Fintech, Healthtech, Edutech, Energy, Telecom, and Industry 4.0, I have also mentored many startups and entrepreneurs to help them fine-tune their goals, products, and professional skills to run a company successfully.
As an internationally published author of scientific papers and books with prestigious organizations, I have extensive experience in innovative tech, financial markets, blockchain, automation, algorithms, AI, ML, computational intelligence, renewable energy, robotics, neuroscience, wireless comms, cloud computing, and cybersecurity.
My most important advice to fellow young entrepreneurs is that passion and motivation are key when building a business from scratch. Despite lacking resources, funding, or talent, a strong team dedicated to hard work and a sensible business goal can pay off in the long run. Never lose hope; every idea stems from unique circumstances and challenging scenarios. Believe in yourself and your idea, and others will believe too. Success comes through multiple iterations of failures that eventually evolve into a sustainable business venture.
What’s the goal of your company?
Our company’s vision is to provide fintech solutions based on AI, ML, and a myriad of the latest technologies to financial market participants around the world, including exchanges, brokerage firms, AMCs, merchant banks, regulators, and investors. Our goal is to increase their ease of operation and boost efficiency, enabling them to reach their business goals.
How important are employees’ energy levels to the success of your company?
We must keep our employees motivated and incentivized so that they can perform with the best productivity and enjoy their work. We deploy several HR policies that ensure their job and family security, allowing them to work in a stress-free mental state. We maintain a strict policy to prevent anyone from overworking, as it causes more harm than good in the long run. Our employees work in both remote and on-premises models, and we encourage a pleasant working environment. We recognize and reward those who excel in their work and constantly provide constructive feedback to help keep their energy levels high.
How do you plan to motivate your team to go the extra mile?
We nurture our employees to be respectful, honest, and transparent, with a supportive mentality that helps us achieve better outputs from teamwork. We give them room to explore their creativity and constantly invest in their personal and professional growth. It is their hard work that enables us to take our company to new heights, and we are grateful to each and every one of them. The sense of appreciation and incentivized rewards drive their motivation to go the extra mile.
What keeps your company moving forward even during challenges?
We have a good strategy in place that helps us achieve more with fewer resources during challenging times. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to downsize and adopt remote work policies, but in the end, we managed to sustain our productivity and push through the challenges in order to deliver excellence that added value to our clients. Our drive to deliver value to our clients pushes our company to overcome difficult challenges.
How do you think technology is leading to changes in businesses? Do you feel it’s helping your company grow?
Technology is changing the landscape of every business. With the advent of AI and ML, especially Large Language Model (LLM) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) based products launched recently, it is breaking through the boundaries of traditional business operation models. Automation is being utilized in every business to offload tasks that waste human resources.
Human resources are valuable and will always play a major role in the adoption of the latest technology. Throughout history, human contributions have led to major changes in civilizations. The dynamics of our current business culture are going to change with time as technology progresses to new heights. We may need to upgrade our skill sets to match current tech trends, but humans will never be completely excluded from the system.
Our company welcomes new technologies and likes to be at the forefront of the latest tech trends. We consider ourselves early adopters, which helps us operate with high productivity, thus adding to our overall growth.
How are your company adapting to digitalization?
We use a variety of technologies to improve our business efficiency and productivity, utilizing different processes to transform our business into a paperless digital environment. We use several methods to adapt to the digital transformation in our business operations:
- Using AI/ML to automate operations
- Adapting to a paperless environment
- Utilizing DevOps for remote teams and projects
- Providing adequate workforce training in remote technologies
- Ensuring policies for the best remote work models and culture
- Encouraging remote collaboration
We measure our operational efficiency and make changes to our policies when required.
Do you use innovative ideas to be unique?
As a fintech company, our primary goal is to provide superior products to our clients in the financial markets. Performance and accuracy are key to our product’s success, and we have to compete in a very challenging environment with zero tolerance for error and latency. These requirements push us to use innovative ideas to help us stay ahead of our competition. We give the freedom to our employees for creative contributions and provide a platform to share innovative ideas that ultimately add to our product’s USP.
What are the services/solutions or products offered by your company as par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services.
Our primary products are:
- Broker hosted Order Management System (OMS) for Equity, Bond, Forex, Commodity, ETF, CFD, etc.
- Central OMS for Stock Exchanges
- Paperless Broker Back Office Solution
- Hybrid Brokerage Solution
- ERP solution for financial institutions
- CRM solution for financial institutions
- RMS solution for financial institutions
Our service offerings are detailed below:
FIX Integration Services
Our software engineering professionals possess extensive expertise in the leading-edge technology stack specific to the securities industry, including C++, Python, SQL, etc.
- FIX connectivity solution
- Development of the technical documentation, including vision, use cases, use case realizations, software architecture, fields mapping and specification documents
- Software development of FIX adapters and APIs of proprietary systems
- Configuration management for FIX products
- Testing of FIX connectivity from the client’s OMS to FIX destinations
- Assisting in passing certification to exchanges and brokerages
- Performance-related tuning of the FIX environment
- Automation of the client’s onboarding process for exchanges
Business Services
- Development of vision documents for developed and emerging markets.
- Operational assessment.
- Business requirements and project development analysis.
Technology Services
- Existing infrastructure performance study
- Existing infrastructure fault tolerance and reliability study
- IT effort cost study
- Development of technology proposal
- Market data feed integration
- Electronic trading systems
- Algorithmic trading system development
- Third-party API integration
- Trade capture system (OMO)
- Asset management automation
- Securities reference data management
- Research data management
- Disaster recovery solutions
- Settlement operations automation
Would you like to say anything else to our viewers?
I want to invite everyone who is interested in exploring our products and services. We look forward to collaborating with brokerage firms, financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and government agencies who are working towards developing global financial markets to understand their requirements and provide affordable and reliable solutions.