Citadel has announced the appointment of Peter Little as chief executive to lead the next phase of the company's growth plans. Based in the firm's London headquarters, his focus is on strengthening Citadel's position across Europe and the US as the only enterprise data management provider to focus purely on the needs of the buy-side.

'Data management has experienced significant growth over the past two years, with firms recognising it as vital to the efficient running of their business, so this is an exciting time to join Citadel,' Little says. 'My aim is to build on its strong foundation and address firms' data requirements as they trade ever more complex instruments in an unforgiving regulatory environment.'

Little has more than 20 years' experience in the financial technology industry. He was co-founder and managing director of Braid Systems, a provider of enterprise application integration and secure messaging technology, which was subsequently acquired by Nasdaq-listed Mercator in 1999.

He has since been an active investor and director of various financial services organisations such as Singularity, a provider of business process management solutions, City Networks, the UK treasury, securities and derivatives software vendor, Whittaker & Garnier, a provider of customer relationship management software to the hedge fund industry, and Investmaster, a software provider to the wealth management industry.

Citadel's technology delivers an efficient and fully audited environment for the management, processing, cleansing and enrichment of corporate data. The Cadis platform launched in 2002 unites legacy systems and allows business users to overcome the challenge of disparate data sources, the firm says.

Implementing a new order management, compliance, performance or risk system places significant stresses on the data infrastructure of an organisation. Through a combination of standardised interfaces and a flexible schema, Cadis enables firms to reduce implementation times and the associated risk significantly. Citadel says its open architecture enables firms to pick the best-fitting solutions, outsource their IT and enter new markets such as derivatives and hedge funds with confidence.

'Peter is a veteran of the financial services industry,' says Citadel chairman John Dallas. 'He is the ideal candidate to drive our growth strategy, helping to capitalise on our buy side connections and address the needs of the hedge fund market, where data demand is the most sophisticated.'

With installations in three continents, Citadel technology is used by buy-side institutions supporting some GBP3trn in assets. Founded in 1999, Citadel offers enterprise data management solutions that can integrate with an existing architecture, providing an accessible platform for cleansed and intelligent data.