Tom Christian
Chief Technology Officer
As Chief Technology Officer, Tom Christian is responsible for SIGNiX’s technology mission and drives business goals by developing strategic direction, managing IT assets and innovating unique solutions. Mr. Christian has extensive experience in developing emerging technologies for the marketplace and spearheading market making business technology initiatives. He relies on his extensive experience to design positive, although sometimes difficult, changes to business processes through the application of technology.
At Finetre he reoriented the company’s early “B to C” architecture to the Financial Services market by creating an infinitely flexible transaction processing exchange technology deployed in an ASP. Some of the more unique aspects of his vision include a methodology for Insurance carriers to describe their products and rules to an automated system in a “standard way.” This ultimately led to the development of AnnuityNet ProductXML, much of which later became the basis for the now industry-standard ACORD PPfA. He envisioned the ability for insurance carriers and annuity distributors to directly control their transactions, and created one of the first instances of large financial institutions prosecuting insurance trades using open web services.
Prior to joining Finetre, he was the CIO of Comtex News Network, a leading aggregator of news content for the electronic distribution marketplace. There he was responsible for executing a successful technology turnaround while also rebuilding and replacing obsolete infrastructure and applications in order to serve the real-time content needs of the financial services marketplace.
Prior to Comtex, he served in variety of key technology roles at the American Red Cross. He led the consolidation of their enterprise database architecture, and the development of both their field chapter management and disaster management systems. Notably, these systems were the first of their kind to offer WAN connectivity and services to the Red Cross using affordable low bandwidth pre-internet technology.
Mr. Christian began his professional life as a “bleeding edge” software engineering consultant for teams serving the United States Navy Test Flight community and similar institutions around the world. This mission involved inventing and building flight simulation and telemetry systems. His work as a key team member of award winning flight simulation technology revolutionized the price point of flight simulation from tens of millions to hundreds of thousands.
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