Andrew Haines has been promoted to CIO at Gain Capital Group, a provider of foreign exchange services. In his new role, Haines will oversee all technology services at Gain, including application development, infrastructure engineering, trading platforms, back-office systems, security and telecommunications.

"I will also collaborate with members of Gain's executive team on developing and executing corporate strategy," says Haines, who previously was the firm's VP of application development. "I plan to spend more time with our clients and partners to ensure we are doing everything possible to meet their needs from a product and technology perspective."

Haines adds that Gain currently supports clients in more than 140 countries, handling as many as 250,000 trade requests per day, making system availability and low-latency vital to the business. "We are building out globally distributed data centers that dynamically balance client traffic for high-availability," he relates. "The platform was designed to scale horizontally, so we can easily increase capacity by adding servers where needed."

As for his product focus, Haines says he will work to extend Gain's proprietary technology by delivering new ways for clients to transact. He explains that this could be either via Web-based platforms, a wireless platform or one of two application programming interfaces (APIs).

According to Haines, he initially will work to build up the development side of the IT team to keep pace with the firm's growth and client demand. "We're currently focused on recruiting talented analysts and software engineers and also partnering with onshore/offshore firms to supplement on development and maintenance projects," he says.

Haines notes that he will leverage his experience at firms including Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney in his new position. "I spent years at big brokerage firms, where I learned how to build bullet-proof trading systems and leverage formal methodologies on enormous budgets," he says. "Then I jumped into the start-up world, where I learned how to get projects done quickly with very limited resources. Now I can apply all of those experiences to build the most efficient and effective technology group possible."