How Michael Kaimakliotis built a strategy-first system designed for scale, resilience and fully customisable portfolios
Modern portfolio management has long relied on fragmented systems, manual workarounds, and products that behave unpredictably under stress. Michael Kaimakliotis, CEO of Tindeco, believes that the gap has held the industry back. Drawing on early lessons across electronic trading floors, private banking and institutional asset management—and years spent studying how risk is priced—he set out to build technology that treats strategies, not instruments, as the true unit of scale.
Early lessons in scale and stress-resilience
When Kaimakliotis reflects on the early years of his career, he often returns to his work on the automated market-making systems that powered the trading-floor operations of Interactive Brokers (IB).It was an early lesson in what scalable systems could achieve long before scalability became a fashionable objective across the industry. Working in the firm’s market-making business gave him a close-range view of a globally integrated engine operating with a level of automation few asset managers would attempt today.
Those systems did more than generate efficiency. They were designed to withstand stress. The firm’s global book of exposures was constantly stress-tested so that, under extreme scenarios, it would make money rather than lose it. The approach worked so well that staff sometimes received an extra month’s salary when the firm earned windfall profits during periods of market disruption. “It acted like an insurance policy embedded in their portfolio,” he recalls. Sacrificing a little profitability in normal markets paid off when volatility spiked.
Those years contributed to his conviction that modern investment management should be systematic, scalable and grounded in integrating risk into front office investment mangement – not just middle office risk management.
A philosophy built from tensions within the private banking wealth management model
That conviction hardened during his time in private banking. He saw clients accumulate portfolios built around a stream of ideas—many of them appealing individually, yet opaque when implemented via complex products and viewed collectively. Products with partial capital protection helped soften anxiety about losses, but they could also dilute the expression of the investment idea and their path-dependent features meant that in extreme moves protection could vanish.
“When several of these sat inside a portfolio, it became difficult to predict how it would behave in sharply falling markets,” he says.
The experience prompted a reconsideration of how ideas were expressed and how portfolio-level risk was managed. Kaimakliotis’ philosophy, “nuanced investing,” is built around viewing both portfolios and ideas as taking exposure to three categories of risk: catastrophic, range-bound and lottery-type exposures.
Clients, he argues, do not think in terms of portfolio volatility or Value at Risk. They think about thresholds they fear and targets they want to reach. “At a portfolio level, investors should not take catastrophic risk” he says. “Many of them will be happy to forego lottery-like portfolio outcomes in order to finance protection against those catastrophic tail risks.”
Traditional approaches often seek to manage risk by setting a constant limit on portfolio volatility. But keeping volatility stable does is not consistent with meeting capital preservation objectives. Instead a more dynamic approach is required – which demands a systematic approach to scale.
Kaimakliotis’ background in creating a constant stream of investment ideas also had an impact. While investment managers typically were associated with a style – for example deep value investing – he saw that different strategies were appropriate in different market segments at different times. And the underlying logic that underpinned the strategy implied how the ideas should best be expressed.
Take the energy sector, when prices fall, high-cost producers will see their earnings fall sharply. If you think oil prices are going to rise strongly it makes sense to buy producers who will go from unprofitable to profitable rather than the producers who remained profitable throughout the downturn. So taking a value oriented approach might not make sense at that point in time in this segment. What’s more taking a lotrery-like exposure via purchasing out of the money call options might make sense.
The idea of building portfolios based on a diverse set of ideas is natural when your job is to come up with ideas. It’s less natural for many investment managers who tend choose a style and specialise in an instrument type (for example equities) and stick with it.
It was unsurprising that the technology to implement a dynamic, ideas-oriented, risk-managed approach to investing was lacking. Even making allocations to different investment styles such as growth, value and momentum in different sectors at different times was not a use-case that was supported.
Instead, what he discovered was an ecosystem of standalone systems — PMS, OMS, optimisation engines, risk tools, compliance modules — none of them speaking a common language or understanding investment logic. “It reminded me of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz,” he says.
Plenty of machinery, but no brain holding it together,” he says. A manager could maintain model portfolios, but could not encode investment intent — how a portfolio was meant to behave under different market conditions — nor personalise it safely at scale, or take an idea from conception to execution without shifting between platforms.
The missing ‘brain’, he concluded, was not another optimisation engine or risk module, but a persistent strategy layer: technology capable of capturing investment logic and translating it into consistent portfolio behaviour and trading actions over time.
The solution therefore had to be built from scratch: a system designed around strategies rather than instruments, with that strategic layer acting as the organising intelligence of the entire investment process.
Making customisation scale like software
That system is now the core of Tindeco. Its no-code Strategy Designer—essentially a visual interface for constructing and governing investment processes—has become a hallmark of the platform. Large managers can use it as a shared language allowing CIOs, product teams and advisers to work inside a strategy together, reducing the time between concept and a client-ready solution. Mid-sized firms often build templates that advisers can personalise within strict parameters. Small managers can rely on fully built strategies while still gaining the possibility to offer clients bespoke outcomes through client-level compliance rules applied automatically.
“What changes is the workflow,” he says. Instead of relying on disconnected one-off analyses, firms design logic that governs how portfolios behave over time—and run it systematically across hundreds or thousands of accounts with full oversight.
Across institutional and wealth clients, he sees the same trend: demand for personalisation delivered with robust controls. Wealth managers need to offer personalisation to differentiate their proposition; institutional managers also face fee massive pressure on collective investments but enjoy strong pricing power for custom mandates. The common challenge is how to scale personalisation without losing safety or consistency. “That is exactly what Tindeco was built to address,” he says.
Technology, he argues, can now push this further. The firm is experimenting with agentic AI that translates natural-language instructions into its proprietary strategy code, enabling advisers and clients to describe intentions in plain English. A unified strategy layer ensures that firms can set precise guardrails around what may be customised, by whom, and within what limits. And because every action is tied back to structured logic, explanations of portfolio behaviour become clearer and easier to communicate.
His broader ambition is to extend institutional-grade portfolio construction to mass-affluent clients. The obstacle, he argues, has always been cost: customisation has traditionally required manual work, making it economically unviable. The solution is to treat strategies — not portfolios or client profiles — as the core unit of scale. A well-designed strategy becomes a living blueprint, automatically adjusting as inputs change and generating compliant actions across all associated accounts. Once built, it can be personalised repeatedly at effectively zero marginal cost.
“Tindeco makes customisation scale like software,” he explains. “You invest in designing a robust strategy once, and the platform lets you deliver it to thousands of clients as easily as to one.”
