Head in the Clouds: Impax COO Darren Johnson

Driven Since Childhood
Johnson, the child of a single mother, says he doesn’t know where exactly he gets his drive from, but explains that his mother was always keen to ensure that he and his sister achieved all they could in life.

“My mother always wanted us to be better than she was, and I think she pushed us to try and do our best. But she wasn’t quite like me, so I don’t know why I am the way I am,” he says. “I’m very competitive and I expect my kids to be very competitive. I expect them to be upset if they don’t win—I don’t expect them to be happy about not winning and happy about just taking part. I think both of those things are aligned. My wife always says that they’ve got to enjoy it, but I say that they’ll enjoy it if they’re actually good at it.”

Cloud King
Given this philosophy, it is no surprise that Johnson has had success on his own journey: he wouldn’t have settled for less. And if there is one technology that has underpinned his success, it is the cloud.

Impax has become well known among the buy side for its cloud policy, which is simply that everything should be deployed within the cloud unless there is a very good reason not to do so.

The firm is currently supported by Bloomberg, FactSet, Linedata, Omgeo and Microsoft, with each vendor hosting a different service. As such, Impax’s front-, middle- and back-office systems are all in private networks, and Johnson says this trend will continue in the years to come.

“The vision is that, eventually, all of us will be able to work anywhere in the world—we will be able to connect to each other and our work anywhere we need to be,” he says. “I think we’re slowly moving toward that, and we’re slowly trying to integrate everything, including our website. At some stage, we’re going to look at client reporting. We currently send manual reports. In the future I’d like to enhance our website to allow our clients to go to the site and look at their reports securely, and all of this is going to be using cloud technology. We are going to continue to innovate and the cloud is helping us to do that.”

Security concerns continue to loom large for many large financial institutions using the cloud, but Johnson plays down the risks, saying that people tend to underappreciate the part cloud plays in everyday life and the length of time it has been in existence.

“We’ve worked in the cloud for so long now,” he says. “People do online banking—where do you think that is? People maybe don’t realize how much they use the cloud and how tried and tested it has been for so many years now. A lot of people say to me, ‘But Darren, what about security?’ But I say to them, ‘Look, cloud security is going to be 10 times better than we have in our servers. If someone wants to hack us here, we haven’t got 100 people working overnight checking our firewall.’ Cloud security is very good, and I think for that reason, it is only functionality—the potential lack of flexibility and regulation—that would stop me using it, rather than anything else.”

Johnson says that as long as he has access to data quickly, he has no qualms whatsoever about using the cloud and sees it as the way of the future. Diminished alpha is requiring firms to be always on the lookout for ways to tighten their operations, and outsourcing to the cloud represents one of the most obvious ways of doing this.