“I’m not your average COO [chief operating officer],” says Stephen Wood, COO at Rathbones Asset Management (RAM), part of the Rathbones investment group.
With 28 years of experience in financial services, he has detailed knowledge of business operations. However, it’s his awareness of digital and data that marks him out as a new breed in his role.
“I’ve worked everywhere from stock exchanges to data vendors to investment banks to buy side to brokers,” says Wood. “I’ve worked in front office, back office, middle office, product, technology and operations, so I’ve got quite a broad background. But most of my career has been in data roles.”
At RAM, Wood helps the rest of the business exploit its information. As well as building strong data foundations, his team is beginning to explore a range of emerging technologies.
Wood recognises that the modern definition of digital transformation is contested and data leaders must investigate a wide gamut of technologies.
“We’re starting to get into artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, tokenisation, all these other things,” he says.
“We’re thinking about all of that together, and AI, and the platforms, and the agents, and everything are just a component of that broader technology strategy.”
Melding operations and data
Wood started his career as a data analyst working in-house and completing consultancy work for a range of organisations, including a stint with software development firm CQG, which helped foster his interest in technology.
“I became the European applications specialist and taught people how to code algorithmic trading systems,” he says.
“I self-taught myself a lot of technology and have always had a tech edge. I’m in a special position of being able to speak tech, but convert it into business, and work both ways.”
In 2012, Wood joined Deutsche Bank as global head of market data, which he describes as an interesting role because it allowed him to manage a self-contained area of the business. It was here that Wood started to meld operational awareness with data savviness.
“You’ve got a finance team, you’ve got a business analyst team, you’ve got the production environment of the data infrastructure, you’ve got the engineering team, you’ve got all these different components, such as administration, and then you have to influence the business to control their budgets, so it’s very much a sales-type role while running a business within a business,” he says.
“I was brought in to build out the portfolio management system, and then, because of my background in data, I saw we needed to develop a data strategy. I built out a data function, took on more responsibility, and then became the COO”
Stephen Wood, Rathbones Asset Management
After a period with web tech firm OpenFin, Wood joined Rathbones in 2021. He fulfilled the responsibilities of his current role through 2025 before being appointed to the COO position at RAM officially in April 2026.
“I was brought in to build out the portfolio management system, and then, because of my background in data, I saw we needed to develop a data strategy,” he says. “I built out a data function, took on more responsibility, and then became the COO.”
Wood says he relishes the opportunities that the role brings. Being COO of RAM means working in a smaller firm within the safety, structure and oversight of the bigger Rathbones business.
“You’ve got all the tools that you can lean on if you need to – you’ve got the policies that are set centrally; you’ve got the financial structure of a bigger organisation, but we have our own board,” he says.
“We can run ourselves as a business,” adds Wood. “And we can be innovative and dynamic. We’re often a frontrunner for a lot of the tech that happens in the broader organisation, because we can roll it out, show the value of it, and then that value can be pushed out across the broader and bigger business.”
Overseeing strategic change
Wood says his day-to-day role covers the oversight and control of external business relationships. He describes RAM as a heavily outsourced business for back-office, middle-office, trading and investment operations. His team also looks after the firm’s Charles River portfolio management system.
Other responsibilities include managing data and reporting, pursuing change and transformation, and helping to develop a long-term technology strategy in partnership with group chief technology officer Brad Novak. Wood reports to RAM CEO Tom Carroll, who reports to Rathbones CEO Jonathan Sorrell.
Building an internal data infrastructure has been a long-term strategic aim for RAM, says Wood. During the past 12 months, this process has reached a stage where the rest of the organisation can leverage the systems to create benefits.
“When you’re sitting within a business, you’re doing this work in the background, and people don’t fully understand it, because that’s not their area of expertise,” he says.
“They see the spend and people coming in. But the past year has shown why we were doing all these things, and we’ve generated significant efficiencies within the business.”
The data foundations that Wood and his team have constructed are a big break from the past. When he joined RAM, he discovered a simple approach to information management, where data was often held in Excel spreadsheets and PDF documents. The transformation approach they’ve taken involves using best-of-breed technologies.
“We use Snowflake as the data cloud,” he says. “We’re starting to leverage the AI tools on top of that platform. We use Alteryx as an ETL [extract, transform, load] and automation platform. We’ve got Experian Aperture Data Studio, which does a lot of our data quality, data catalogue and data lineage. We also use MuleSoft at the group level for integration.
“We’ve also spent time building out MSCI BarraOne as our quant risk platform for performance attribution. We’ve now got all that data sharing to Snowflake. We built dashboards off the back of that effort. Those dashboards allow us to do far more granular analytics to give the fund managers more insight into their models and the way that things are working.”
Building on the foundations
Wood says the shift to Snowflake began two years ago, when the broader Rathbones group began deploying the AI Data Cloud platform. He suggested to senior executives at group level that RAM could use the technology to manage its data headache.
“What we don’t have is Snowflake engineers who can physically go and do some of the things that we need to,” he says.
“Therefore, we rely on going back into the group to do that work,” adds Wood. “But we do have direct access to our environment; we can build pipelines through Alteryx, for example. So, we can manage our environment. And that approach has allowed us to continue moving forward.”
Wood’s organisation has set up nine datasets in the Snowflake data platform. These datasets cover a range of areas, including performance, risk, sustainability and unstructured information, such as the decisions behind the firm’s investment activities. Now the aim is to use these foundations to help the organisation embrace emerging technologies, such as agentic AI.
“Because of the maturity of the data infrastructure and what we’ve built out, we’re able to start leveraging AI in a real way rather than just the idea where people are just looking at it,” he says.
“What we’re really interested in is how we supercharge the front office, the product specialists, the sales and distribution teams, while having a sharp focus on our bottom line in terms of our cost base.”
Wood says RAM is eager to scale its business and increase its total assets under management. However, as the business scales, the firm is eager to keep costs in check – and that’s where the hard work from his data team should pay dividends. Wood expects this refined approach to continue as the business concentrates on long-term growth.
“As more money is invested into our funds, which obviously makes us more profitable, the cost of business goes up significantly,” he says.
“Most people throw human resources at that challenge. Our aim has always been over the last four or five years to focus on how we can minimise that expenditure increase and still get the benefits of growth.”
Continuing the journey
Wood says his firm’s agentic explorations are already underway. The organisation has a test environment for Snowflake’s CoWork, the software firm’s personal agent for knowledge workers, and CoCo, its coding agent for developers and data engineers. This test environment is running with millions of rows of data.
RAM’s agentic explorations are part of a wider sectoral step towards emerging technologies. Analyst Forrester recognises financial services has been characterised as slow to adopt agents. However, innovative finance firms are building agentic capabilities tailored to the sector’s demands for precision, compliance, auditability and reliability.
As a senior data leader in the industry, Wood recognises that tests with services like CoCo and CoWork show how his firm could bolster its resource-constrained engineering resources with agentic capability. However, it’s also crucial to place AI explorations within a broader context.
“One of the things that we’ve been thinking about is how agentic AI fundamentally changes your entire operating model as a business,” he says.
“If you roll forward and really take advantage of the technology, then your subject matter experts become experts in managing agents and ensuring they’re continuously trained with the latest information to be able to produce the best outputs. So, it’s a massive shift.”
The watchword, therefore, is caution. While Wood and his team at RAM often pioneer data deployments within the Rathbones group, it’s important to remember that embracing emerging technology requires a focus on the elements that matter most to the executives who run the organisation.
“We think big, but we’re still a small business,” he says. “We want to move quickly, but at the same time, we’re sensible about the things that we do.
“We still need to focus on control environments and compliance. I’ve spoken to many people in the financial services industry. We’re starting to understand what we need to do, but we’re not there yet. We’re at the beginning of the journey.”
