Ray Chen
Director of Data and Intelligence
At Trumid, we view our products as an ongoing conversation with our clients. Every feature, UI tweak, and latency improvement is our half of it. Whether we're responding to direct feedback or anticipating a market need, the goal is the same: rapidly build a solution, put it in the client's hands, and ask, 'Did we hear you?' If the answer is no, we iterate and ask again. When we finally get a 'Yes, you got me,' the space between us and the client shrinks.
This is why velocity matters. If a client gives us feedback and we wait for a massive, monolithic quarterly release to address it, the conversation becomes sluggish. The true goal of a high-velocity Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) isn’t speed for speed’s sake; it is entirely in service of the client relationship.
To accelerate what has always been our competitive advantage—rapid iteration—we are evolving our workflow into two interconnected concepts: the Studio and the Factory.
To accelerate our competitive advantage—rapid iteration—we are evolving our workflow into two interconnected concepts: the Studio and the Factory.
By shifting our time heavily toward the "thinking" phase, we do more than just react to client challenges—we leverage our deep market expertise to anticipate their needs and drive innovation
The Studio: Crystallizing the Idea
Historically, software development has been constrained by fabrication time. Teams would spend the majority of their time writing code and a fraction of their time thinking about the problem they were looking to solve.
By adopting and implementing AI, we are deliberately flipping that paradigm. The Studio is where we now focus most of our energy and time. It is a space for intense communication and collaboration where we achieve absolute alignment on the what, why, and how before a single line of production code is written.
Because we deeply value our engineering team’s time and focus, our goal is for every line of code we write to advance the conversation with our clients. The Studio is where we rigorously interrogate ideas upfront to ensure we are building solutions that allow us to continuously iterate with the client. By shifting our time heavily toward the “thinking” phase, we do more than just react to challenges—we leverage our deep market expertise to anticipate client needs and drive innovation. We deploy specialized AI agents as active co-workers during this phase—systematically challenging hypotheses and rigorously structuring our ideas. By doing this, we ensure our developers’ time is focused where it has the highest impact, freeing them up to pitch new ideas and focus on what actually delivers tangible value for our team and for our clients.
The Studio is where we rigorously interrogate ideas upfront to ensure we’re building solutions that continuously evolve through client feedback.
Ray Chen, Director of Data and Intelligence
The Factory: Accelerating Execution
Once an idea is fully crystallized in the Studio, the Factory takes over for execution.
If the Studio is where we spend 80% of our time thinking, the “Agentic Factory” is how we compress the execution down to the remaining 20%. Rather than using AI merely as glorified autocomplete, we are codifying our workflows into the platform itself. We have transitioned our teams from manual coding to agentic coding, allowing us to fabricate solutions at a fraction of the historical time and cost.
The Factory is how we codify our standards into a consistently repeatable process. By making institutional knowledge available to specialized AI agents, we have been able to automate away massive amounts of operational friction. Many of our internal achievements speak for themselves: we are on track to deliver nearly four times as many software releases this year as we did in 2024, while simultaneously reducing our overall technology costs year over year.
Ultimately, this removes the bottleneck of manual execution while keeping quality and reliability at the center of how we build.
The Factory is how we codify our standards into a consistently repeatable process.
Compressing the Feedback Loop & Delivering Outcomes
A common risk when accelerating the SDLC is that communication can break down and silos form. However, AI has allowed us to dramatically streamline and automate that communication to keep our internal teams aligned. We use AI agents to synthesize our daily development activity and broadcast human-readable summaries across our product, design, and engineering teams. This ensures everyone wakes up with complete awareness of exactly what ideas transitioned into reality the day before.
Ultimately, compressing this feedback loop allows us to do more than just deliver innovative, market-defining products faster—it fundamentally strengthens our client relationships. Features like our recently launched Trumid Smart Voice™, our new functionality enabling users to convert unstructured conversations into pre-filled trade tickets ready for trader review, are the direct result of a culture that can take an idea, fabricate it safely and more quickly, and continuously validate it. When we can respond to the market with that kind of velocity, we build a foundation of trust, proving to our clients that their voices directly shape our platform.
Trumid Studios
Operating the Studio and the Factory in tandem allows us to scale our platform’s capabilities without losing our agility. The AI guardrails we’ve put in place are designed to help sustain this high velocity without compromising safety. We cannot simply ship more code at the expense of quality, because once that happens, you break down client trust and client fit doesn’t matter anymore.
Our people are Trumid’s greatest strength, and our responsibility as leaders is to help them do their best work. As the Factory takes on more of the execution, our teams can spend their time where it matters most: on the collaboration, the complex problem-solving, and the client relationships that AI can enhance, but never replace.
Our ultimate vision is to establish Trumid Studios as the premier destination in fintech for ideators. Whether you are a client, an engineer, a product manager, or a partner, if you have a great idea, we want to build the best environment in the industry to bring that idea to life and to the market.
Ray Chen is a senior engineering leader at Trumid who has worked alongside CTO Tony Schiavo for more than a decade, helping scale the firm’s technology platform and development organization.
