In her second week as CFO, Cristina Kim sat with Octaura’s leadership team reviewing a three-year strategy and ambitious 2026 targets, she tells us. As the numbers appeared on the screen, her instinct was to do what she had done for nearly two decades: probe what might go wrong, stress-test assumptions, and look for what could break, she tells us. Mid-meeting, she experienced what she calls an “aha moment”—realizing she was no longer outside the story but inside it, responsible for helping the team achieve those goals, she tells us.
Read MoreThat shift caps a career built on breadth rather than a linear ladder. Cristina began in investment banking in Hong Kong before spending 17 years in JP Morgan’s strategic investments group across London and the United States, she tells us. There, she learned to sit at the center of technology innovation, translating between business needs, risk, and upside, and working closely with management teams and CFOs, she tells us. Over time, investing in Octaura and partnering with its leaders made her want to move from evaluating companies to helping build one, she tells us.
Today at Octaura—an electronic trading platform and data company focused on loans and CLOs, she tells us—Cristina is applying that investor muscle in new ways. She is building frameworks for resource allocation, pushing for more granular, week-to-week metrics, and exploring how AI-enabled forecasting and internal data tools can sharpen decisions, she tells us. The discipline remains, but now it is in service of writing the story from within, she tells us.
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CFOTL: So I want to ask you about Octaura, because I think listeners will quickly understand how this opportunity got on your radar, and why you—better than many—would understand the opportunity. Tell us about Octaura. You mentioned you were already an investor and familiar with them. What sets them apart?
Kim: Octaura is an electronic trading platform and data company. You’re familiar, Jack, with equities trading exchanges like NASDAQ—so Octaura is focusing on fixed income products, especially loans and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs).
Until now, the loan market has been incredibly manual—traders working through spreadsheets, phone calls, and emails. Octaura is transforming how that is done by using technology to innovate and create better trading protocols so investors and traders can have more transparency and execute trades much faster than before.
Read MoreWhat really sets Octaura apart is, number one, the talent and market knowledge the management team brings. Number two is the technology we have built to evolve this antiquated trading process. And number three is the ecosystem around the table as investors. We have banks and buy-side institutions—market makers and takers—invested in this platform, giving them skin in the game as they help drive this market’s transformation.
CFOTL: The way I was looking at it—correct me if I’m wrong—Octaura is not trying to be a bank, but it does modernize parts of the loan and CLO markets that banks have historically played in. How do you balance being a disruptor with being a collaborator?
Kim: That’s absolutely right, Jack. The key is that we are disrupting in collaboration with current market players and incumbents. When the banks and buy side want to see change—and want to do it in partnership with Octaura—that’s how you disrupt in a way that understands what the market wants and needs.
Just look at the numbers: on the loan side, we have about 30 dealers trading through Octaura and 160–165 buy-side institutions using the platform. We recently launched CLOs about two months ago and already have about 12 dealers and about 60 buy-side firms on the platform. That tells you Octaura is disrupting with the market, not against it.
Octaura | www.octaura.com | New York, NY