Spotlight Interview: Casper Strømfeldt on Building Scalable Fixed Income Technology

Learn how the future of portfolio management lies in scalable infrastructure, careful data handling, and technology designed to grow alongside clients.

Q: Casper, could you start by introducing yourself and sharing what drew you to IMTC?

Casper Strømfeldt: My background is actually in physics, which was already very computer-driven when I studied it. Toward the end of my thesis, I realized physics wasn’t the right long-term path for me, so I shifted into IT roles.

I first worked on data collection for the World Health Organization, focusing on communicable diseases across Europe. Later, I moved into mobile device management and eventually into resource management software with a group that went on to found IMTC. That was about 10 years ago.

I was one of the very first people on the IMTC team—I probably wrote the first 5% of code that went into the product. At the time, we knew nothing about fixed income. We pulled in experts from banks in Denmark and started building. Initially, our focus was on bond discovery and understanding the universe of bonds, and portfolio management capabilities came later.

Q: And what is your current role at IMTC?

Casper Strømfeldt: I’m the Chief Technology Officer, and I’ve been working in fixed income since 2014 when we began building the first version of the platform.

Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in fixed income technology since then?

Casper Strømfeldt: The biggest shift has been the recognition by asset managers that they need more advanced technology to drive their business. For years, we saw billion-dollar firms running everything on Excel spreadsheets. That works only up to a point—but scaling beyond it is nearly impossible.

Today, there’s much broader acknowledgement across the industry that scalable, cloud-based technology is essential for growth.

Q: And what persistent challenges do wealth and asset managers still face?

Casper Strømfeldt: Scalability is the major challenge. If you’re running everything on a desktop in Excel, it’s nearly impossible to manage 15,000 portfolios effectively. As an investor, if your portfolio manager is handling that many accounts in Excel, it’s unlikely they’ll look at your assets more than once a year.

True scalability requires tools designed for it from the ground up.

Q: How did your previous roles prepare you to solve these problems at IMTC?

Casper Strømfeldt: My strength has always been working with data—understanding what it represents and how to process it. Back at the WHO, I built systems for monitoring disease data, which meant digging into individual records to understand the story they told.

That same mindset applied when building IMTC. Even though fixed income was new to me, the challenge was familiar: understanding data at a granular level, then designing systems to handle it effectively at scale.

Q: Do you have a particular story that highlights how IMTC helps clients solve problems?

Casper Strømfeldt: I remember being in a client meeting where someone on their team mentioned a problem they were trying to solve—almost in passing. One of our team members quickly said, “Actually, IMTC has a feature that handles that.”

The client was surprised and impressed: “Wow, that’s exactly what we need.” Moments like that show the importance of listening carefully to clients. Sometimes they don’t realize the solution is already available, and it’s incredibly rewarding to show them the possibilities.

Q: What transformations do you see when clients modernize their portfolio management with IMTC?

Casper Strømfeldt: The biggest transformation is scalability. Some of our clients were already large when they adopted IMTC, but our platform enabled them to add hundreds of portfolios—and hundreds of clients—to their business each month.

That kind of growth simply wouldn’t be possible without technology built to scale.

Q: Looking ahead, what trends in fixed income tech adoption will shape the next five years?

Casper Strømfeldt: Everyone expects me to say AI, and while AI will be important, I don’t think it will transform portfolio construction in fixed income the way some expect. Fixed income is very numbers-driven—you can calculate durations, yields, and optimize portfolios against benchmarks with precision. There’s no “magic” to it.

Where AI will matter is in functionality within applications: guiding users, enhancing workflows, and helping managers make better decisions more efficiently.

Q: Finally, what advice would you give portfolio managers and CIOs starting their digitization journey?

Casper Strømfeldt: Design with scale in mind from the very beginning. If you build a system to handle 100 portfolios per client, it’s fundamentally different from a system that can handle 100,000 portfolios.

At IMTC, we’ve learned this lesson over the years. Retrofitting scalability is possible but far more difficult than building it into the foundation. For firms beginning their digital transformation, scalability shouldn’t be an afterthought—it should be the starting point.