Keeping the Conversation Going

One of the benefits of the pandemic is that all of us have had to get more comfortable with change. Almost overnight we shifted our work lives online – commuting to the kitchen table instead of the City and catching up over video rather than over a beer. This changed the way we all shared ideas, but as an active participant in the capital markets arena, we made the effort to stay in conversation with the broader fixed income community to better understand the key challenges they face and develop solutions together. To keep this conversation going we created the Sell Side Fixed Income Network where we look to regularly review key topics for the industry. We recognised that all of us benefit from regular discussions exploring what others are thinking about, what is driving decisions, and what problems we are facing. We are providing a forum that allows market participants to understand and benchmark their views against their peer group. We kicked off this initiative at the end of 2021 and are seeing excellent growth in the network. Initially created to be online, we will further look to expand on how we engage the network through webinars and in-person events in 2022. From our latest report, we identified a number of key trends, and the community was very clear in highlighting the biggest barrier to growth in 2022 is internal technology limitations. Digging further into the detail, the three key technology issues raised were the inability to change quickly, legacysilo-based data, and total cost of ownership of vendor platforms. valantic FSA partners with the community to address these three challenges. Strategic Agility – Getting results now. The first is strategic agility and the ability for clients to make changes quickly. Working to be both a change agent by directly helping our clients make changes quicker, but also as an enabler for change providing the tools and frameworks to help our clients build on their existing systems. We are addressing the problems that clients are facing now, and helping them to fix them now, as opposed to them waiting for a multi-year project to be completed. For example, today it is possible to create front ends that source data from both legacy and other 3rd party platforms. In this way, technology debt can be paid off incrementally, and firms can embark on a path of continuous innovation. The Wider View–Better insights. The second is moving from data silos to data centricity. Being able to pull together large data sets from multiple systems and data sources is not easy. Our tools allow firms to move away from a classic silo-based approach and put a layer across all data. This wider view leads to greater insights and the ability to deliver better customer service. Clarity on TCO The final piece is reducing the total cost of ownership by looking at all associated costs of running a platform as opposed to just focusing on the cost of software licensing. Understanding the elements involved and being able to address all of them is key. In addition to automating our clients’ workflows for pricing, quoting, trading, and data aggregation in Fixed Income, we provide our solutions in a fully managed SaaS offering allowing clear cost reduction strategies to be implemented. As well as addressing these current needs, we have ambitious plans to enhance and develop new tools for the community in the coming year. Continuous platform development - We are continuing to work on our technology transformation capabilities by leveraging our low code development framework. Using this framework, we assist clients by building around their current legacy systems that aren’t quite cutting it for them. As new tools become available, they can be easily integrated into existing workflows and put into production with minimal effort or disruption. Growing Opportunities - Our mission is to digitise, augment and evolve the value streams within our clients. We will be expanding our geographical reach and broadening our product line of core software solutions as we grow internationally. This includes specific Capital Markets Solutions but also has application across financial services, building on our success to date. At valantic FSAwe have successfully digitised the workflow for over 100 firms in the financial industry, building robust and highly innovative systems for trading, workflow management and downstream transaction automation. In the next edition of our Sell Side Fixed Income expert network, we will be digging deeper into the technology issues that are hampering growth – please reach out if you’d like to learn more about the network.