April 2, 2025
As a Quality Assurance tester at TMX Group, the company that owns both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Montreal Exchange, I play a critical role in ensuring the complex systems that facilitate trades function flawlessly.
Beyond Traditional Stock Trading
While many people are familiar with stock exchanges, my work at the Montreal Exchange involves a different class of financial instruments. At TMX, I work specifically for the Montreal Exchange side. Here, we don’t trade stocks but derivatives—options, futures, swaps, and other complex financial products.
These sophisticated financial instruments require equally sophisticated trading platforms, and that’s where my expertise comes into play.
Bringing New Financial Products to Life
One of the most exciting aspects of my role is being involved in developing new financial products.
While specific details remain confidential due to business sensitivity, I can share the thrill of being part of such innovation.
We’re creating a new baby and seeing it come to life.
We are developing a product that’s unique in the market. We’re building both the product itself—how the trading works—and all the supporting software, risk configurations, risk requirements, and the architecture of how everything fits together.
We do all this in-house. In this collaborative environment, I serve a crucial quality assurance function.
I’m the person who ensures that once each small piece is completed, I test all the products and provide feedback on quality, potential improvements, and then every week we come together to discuss progress.
Bridging Finance and Technology
With my background in finance rather than IT, I bring a valuable perspective to the technical aspects of my work.
What I find fascinating is that my background is actually finance, not IT. So I really love that we’re creating a new financial instrument.
If you really think about it, there’s no physical product we’re talking about here. It’s all people’s intelligence.
A Unique Industry Ecosystem
The financial exchange industry in Canada has distinctive characteristics that shape my professional experience.
The industry I’m in right now is unique—we only have one company in Canada that owns all the Canadian stock exchanges. The Toronto Stock Exchange and the Montreal Exchange are both owned by one company.
Knowledge Environment
This concentration creates both challenges and opportunities.
It’s a very specific industry. You cannot find detailed information online, but within the industry, within the company, we have so much knowledge and expertise.
This internal knowledge ecosystem becomes invaluable when tackling complex problems. Whenever I have questions, no matter what they are, sometimes I think ahead about what the new product will be like two years in the future and how it will grow.
For those questions, there’s always someone within my company and team who knows exactly what I’m looking for.
The Quality Assurance Process
When testing new systems, I employ a thoughtful approach that combines financial expertise with technical acumen.
I need to understand what the product is and how our future users will interact with it when the product comes to life, and then develop a testing strategy accordingly.
I need to think about all those weird situations, especially the ones users don’t normally encounter, because that’s what my job is for—to think about what-if situations that our software should support.
This comprehensive testing draws on multiple skill sets. It requires a deep understanding of the financial instruments themselves, the business context, and how our software works.
I then need to communicate my findings to our programmers and architects, which requires me to understand technical terminology.
Tools and Methodologies
Our team employs both automated and manual testing approaches.
We use Python to develop in-house automation testing tools. There’s also a significant component of manual testing to consider all the different scenarios.
For organizing our work, the team follows agile methodologies. In our team, we have daily morning meetings where we discuss what’s important and address any questions that have arisen.
We structure our work into three-week sprints, setting clear priorities at the start to guide what needs to be done.
Conclusion
Effective quality assurance is fundamentally a team effort.
If I have any questions, feel the importance level of a task has shifted, or find that a programmer hasn’t delivered a task close to the deadline when I need time to test, I will bring it up.
Group communication is really important in our work.
I’ll check in with colleagues: Hey, where are you in the process? When do you think it can be delivered to me so I can test?
This open communication helps us stay on track with our development timeline.
With my combination of financial expertise and technical testing skills, I play an essential role in bringing new trading capabilities to Canada’s financial markets.
My work shows how quality assurance professionals serve as crucial guardians of system integrity, ensuring that the complex machinery of modern finance operates seamlessly and reliably for all market participants.