Plotly Virtual Hangout - Jeff Butler from CIBC

Jeff Butler from CIBC shares his experience using Plotly Dash to support complex financial analytics. Working on the XVA trading desk within the Resource Management Group, Jeff focuses on managing credit and funding risk related to over-the-counter derivatives. His team acts as a central hub across asset classes such as interest rates, foreign exchange, equities, and commodities.

Key responsibilities involve building infrastructure to analyze risk and support decision-making for client trades. This includes:

• Running a large Monte Carlo simulation engine with trillions of calculations each night
• Managing a real-time P&L and credit valuation adjustment (CVA) framework
• Delivering dashboards that summarize risk across multiple asset classes and client attributes

Jeff transitioned from credit risk management to a more technical and analytical role during tenure at CIBC. He emphasized the value of institutional knowledge, long-term relationships, and the ability to guide systems through their full life cycles.

Over the years, his tools evolved significantly:

• Early workflows relied heavily on Excel, VBA, and SQL
• Recent work uses Python, Jupyter, Databricks, Spark, and Dash Enterprise
• The XVA engine was one of the first compute-heavy applications deployed to the cloud at CIBC

As the bank's data volume grew, so did the need for tools that could scale. Dash and Plotly became central to building interactive analytics applications that summarize large datasets for a diverse set of stakeholders.

Jeff also touched on CIBC’s adoption of AI. While regulatory constraints require caution, the institution is actively exploring AI technologies, balancing innovation with security and data protection requirements.

His perspective reflects how domain expertise in finance can pair effectively with modern data tools to produce impactful, production-grade analytics. Jeff also noted that Plotly Dash enables non-engineers to create sophisticated, user-friendly tools, which helps increase adoption across business teams.

Watch the video to hear Jeff’s full story and see how Plotly is supporting high-stakes financial analytics at scale.