Deriv Promotes Its Security Chief to CTO

Deriv has named Rotimi Akinyele as its Chief Technology Officer, moving him from the security function to lead the broker’s engineering organisation, Finance Magnates has learned.

London's trading industry is coming home!

Akinyele joined Deriv in July 2024 as Vice President of Security. He first led Security and Data, then automation work in Compliance, Data and Finance, and most recently in Trading and Antifraud.

As CTO, he is tasked with automating work across every function, improving Deriv’s internal AI tooling, and building a software development process in which AI agents help improve their own output.

Deriv said security and access controls remain part of that work as agents receive more access and responsibility.

The appointment came as the broker has set a target of automating 75% of its manual workflows by the end of 2026.

A CTO with a Cybersecurity Background

Akinyele’s earlier roles were in information security. Before Deriv, he was Director in the Group Information Security Department at Dubai Holding, covering cybersecurity across the conglomerate’s hospitality, real estate, ICT, media and education units. Before that, he was Head of Information Security and Business Continuity at a government authority in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE.

Rakshit Choudhary, Deriv’s CEO, tied the choice to the company’s automation plans. “As we automate more and give agents greater access and responsibility, we have more systems and operations to secure,” he said.

Akinyele said his aim is to hold the current pace of engineering change, “while making sure security and controls grow with every system we automate.”

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Where the Automation Stands

Choudhary spoke about the scale of that effort in an interview with Finance Magnates in September. He said, “no one writes code manually anymore at Deriv,” and described operations across HR, finance, compliance, marketing, product and engineering as automated with AI tools.

He then said staff get access to AI tools and weekly training sessions, and that some roles previously seen as redundant have been absorbed by automation. Deriv has also been building AI and data hubs in Malta, Dubai and Malaysia, among other offices.

Security has been part of Deriv’s AI work for some time. The company has described a SecAI bot, built with Claude-3.7 and AWS GuardDuty, that analyses security alerts in real time and automates responses.

Deriv is not the only broker restructuring around automation. NAGA Group has said AI now handles most of its chat-based customer support without human agents, and that automation lets it run its marketing department with roughly 20% fewer staff.