Delivery in commodity trading IT slows down when no one can state, precisely and in operational terms, who owns each outcome and on what rhythm decisions, releases and incident responses are expected to happen.
Inside real trading technology organisations, the problem is rarely a mystery of talent or goodwill. It is structural. Trading desks, risk, operations and IT each view “ownership” through a different lens. Is ownership about budget, technical design, production uptime, or regulatory exposure. When these definitions diverge, a project may have multiple sponsors and no single accountable owner. That fuzziness is survivable in quiet periods. In volatile markets, it becomes lethal to throughput. Everyone is consulted; no one is clearly in charge.
The problem compounds at the handoffs. A front office quant signs off on a pricing model in isolation from integration engineers. A risk lead agrees a VaR enhancement with a vendor, assuming IT will “make it work”. Production support inherits a fragile batch schedule that no one quite understands. In each step, the operating rhythm changes. Weekly steering for the sponsors, daily stand-ups for the developers, monthly change boards for operations. Requests queue up between rhythms. No one designs the end-to-end cadence, so the path of least resistance becomes delay.
Hiring alone feels like the obvious remedy. More engineers, more project managers, more business analysts. In practice, adding people into a murky ownership model usually adds queueing and coordination load rather than flow. New joiners arrive into a context where product ownership is contested and decision cycles are unclear. They spend their first months learning how to navigate politics rather than delivering increments that matter.
There is also a structural mismatch between permanent hiring and the volatility of commodity trading demand. Seasonal booking spikes, regulatory deadlines and sudden strategy pivots from the trading floor generate highly uneven workloads. Filling every perceived gap with a full-time role either inflates fixed cost or leads leaders to compromise on quality. Fast hiring often means misaligned skills, and misaligned skills intensify the need for supervision. Supervisors already struggle with unclear operating rhythm. The result is more bodies tied into the same slowing system.
Classic outsourcing, especially in its fully managed form, typically promises to “take ownership” of delivery. For commodity trading IT, that promise is seductive and often damaging. The outsourcing partner defines its own processes, its own cadence, its own governance artefacts. Over time, two parallel operating rhythms emerge: one inside the firm, one inside the supplier. Every integration, every production incident, every change request now crosses an organisational border with its own escalation tree.
This dual structure obscures the very thing that was missing to begin with: single-threaded ownership. Service levels and contractual constructs measure ticket closure and uptime, not real business outcomes like reduction in P&L adjustment, faster curve onboarding or improved VaR explain. When something important slows down, the dialogue becomes a negotiation about scope, change control and service credits. Accountability fragments further, and trading stakeholders experience IT as even less responsive.
In a highly specialised domain like commodity trading, classic outsourcing also tends to detach engineers from real context. They operate to a statement of work drafted months earlier. That document rarely captures the fluidity of trading strategies, new products, clearing changes or risk policy shifts. Delivery teams are incentivised to minimise deviation from the agreed scope, precisely when the front office needs responsive adjustment. The outsourcing model’s rigidity clashes with the trading floor’s volatility, stretching lead times rather than compressing them.
When this problem is actually solved, the organisation looks different in very practical ways. First, every initiative and key platform capability has a clearly named accountable owner inside the firm. Not a committee or a steering group, but a person. That owner can tell you, in plain language, the outcome they are responsible for, the boundaries of their authority, and the forum where unresolved conflicts get escalated.
Second, the operating rhythm is designed end to end, not team by team. Trading, risk, operations and IT agree a shared cadence for prioritisation, delivery and release. For example, weekly cross-functional prioritisation with the desk, fortnightly production releases on a predictable day, daily joint review of incidents over a fixed 20-minute slot. The result is that requests, decisions and changes move through the organisation on a visible timetable. Handoffs still exist but they are intentional and rehearsed rather than improvised.
Once that foundation is in place, traditional outsourcing models can be treated as an operating model rather than a desperate capacity plug. The firm retains ownership and decision rights. External professionals are brought in to execute against clearly defined responsibilities within that owned framework. They are not handed vague objectives. They join concrete delivery groups with a known cadence, a named internal product owner and explicit integration practices.
The integration detail matters. Specialists engaged through traditional outsourcing models sit inside the firm’s backlog, ceremonies and tooling. They take direction from internal leaders, work against the same definition of done, and participate in the same release and incident rhythms. Their expertise is additive: deep knowledge of energy scheduling platforms, market data ingestion, risk engines or regulatory reporting patterns that the internal team may lack in depth but owns in outcome terms. Because the firm’s leaders have already clarified ownership and cadence, everyone understands who decides and when.
Solving the delivery slowdown in commodity trading IT is therefore less about heroic hiring or finding the perfect vendor and more about structuring ownership and rhythm, then augmenting with the right external professionals. When ownership of outcomes is clear and the operating cadence is explicit, extra capacity has somewhere precise to attach. traditional outsourcing models becomes a way to bring in screened specialists, already fluent in relevant technologies and patterns, who can join that rhythm within three to four weeks and contribute without diluting accountability. The problem starts as “delivery slowing down because ownership and operating rhythm are unclear”. Hiring alone cannot fix that structural gap. Classic outsourcing often deepens it by shifting visibility and decision rights outside. traditional outsourcing models, applied deliberately, solves it by preserving internal ownership, aligning everyone to a single operating rhythm, and adding specialists who can start fast and deliver at the level of quality trading businesses now require. If that is the bottleneck, the next step is not another reorg, but a focused review of ownership, cadence and where targeted external capacity could unlock flow.