Working at Varrlyn and in capital markets consulting

11 September 2019 Consultancy.eu

Varrlyn is a Netherlands-based consulting firm specialising in capital markets. Company co-founder Stephan van der Windt and Sathya Chandrasekaran – who has been with the consultancy for over eight years now – spoke to Consultancy.eu about what life is like at the firm.

Focusing on system implementations and application support, Varrlyn works with clients to develop the dealing room applications of financial institutions. With extensive experience in IT system implementations and application support for different financial markets applications, the professionals at Varrlyn have a proven track record, working for financial institutions in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, New York, Frankfurt and Sydney.

Since it was founded in 2010, the firm has gone from strength to strength. According to co-founder Stephan van der Windt, in the nine years since its launch, Varrlyn has worked to expand its client base via innovative new routes of engagement, while beefing up its HR and operations processes to attract top talent, and fostering a healthy work-life balance to retain skilled staff in a competitive market. “We provide our consultants with an in-depth training curriculum, giving them the possibility to constantly learn and be competitive,” he said.

Working at Varrlyn and in capital markets consulting

One of the consultants to have benefitted from this is Sathya Chandrasekaran. According to Chandrasekaran, Varrlyn does its best to encourage the individual professional growth of its staff, which has powered the firm’s rapid success. As a trained and certified Enterprise Architect, he feels he is with no doubt a more mature professional, compared to when he joined the firm’s ranks in 2011.

In the intervening time, he has worked in the field of infrastructure planning, data warehouse and business intelligence, capacity sizing and performance engineering with the IT systems of large multinational banks. Chandrasekaran engaged with clients across a plethora of financial services segments too, working in the areas of retail banking, transaction banking and capital markets implementations, among others. Projects he has spent time on range from product implementations of Murex platforms, to collateral management and client’s new tooling and transformation journeys, with his role spanning from testing and releasing to deployment management.

“Working at Varrlyn is a fulfilling experience,” he commented, “both from a professional as well as personal point of view.”

For Van der Windt, Chandrasekaran is emblematic of the corporate culture which has inspired its staff to strive for more. Stating that “at Varrlyn we share victories, as well as downs,” Van der Windt added that despite a recent family bereavement, Chandrasekaran had continued to be a key member of the firm’s team.

“Sathyamurthy has kept on being a top performer,” Van der Windt explained, “even when high results were demanded in a short timeframe, aware he could count on his company’s support. Because this is what we are: a company made of real people, for people, with actual connections; and a place where reaching out to management and staff is always possible, where our consultants can freely speak their mind.”

However, despite its early success there is still much to be done at the consulting firm according to the two Varrlyn professionals. Chandrasekaran explained that his personal aspirations are not fully satisfied yet, and that he aims at being a leader, able to create and implement constantly better solutions as an Engineering Manager – something Varrlyn is fully supportive of. On a grander scale, meanwhile, the company’s co-founder is determined to see the firm similarly seek to better itself.

“Nevertheless, we still want more,” Van der Windt concluded. “We want to further diversify the variety of projects our resources will be able to work on and give them the best chances of professional development, create even stronger connections between all our consultants offering the possibility to join conferences, lectures and team building occasions to strengthen our company as a cohesive collective.”

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