Tim Keady, DTCC Chief Client Officer and Head of DTCC Solutions
When you look at financial firms today, they’re often using a patchwork of siloed platforms for their post-trade processing. This maze of legacy technology is costly to maintain, increases risk and limits organizational agility. When speaking with clients, they want a synchronized and integrated ecosystem that can be accessed through a single entry point, linking matching, settlement and asset servicing, with simple navigation to ancillary services and accessible from multiple digital channels. This vision seemed outside the realm of possibility just a few years ago, but with advances in technologies like cloud computing, APIs and distributed ledgers, creating a fully-integrated digital ecosystem could be a reality in the not-too-distant future.
Transforming Client Onboarding
One of the top challenges across the industry is onboarding products and services to new and existing clients. It can be a complex and lengthy process. At DTCC, we’re trying to solve this by creating a simple and convenient one-click onboarding process for our Global Trade Repository (GTR) service. It’s been successful in eliminating manual data errors and expediting contract signing as our clients prepare for Brexit. We’re bringing this same thinking to other parts of the process, including exploring how bots can help us reduce the time it takes to onboard a service. And as we build out new self-service capabilities using technology, we’re freeing up our people to focus their time on more strategic client matters.
Leveraging Cloud in Service Delivery
Cloud computing has been around for years, but most financial firms were hesitant to leverage the technology because it lacked the strict security, privacy and compliance controls required in a highly-regulated industry. Many of these challenges have been addressed, although more progress is needed before we can move the most critical applications off premises. Despite that, we’ve had success overhauling our legacy IT infrastructure using the cloud, including employing the technology for our real-time swaps data reporting. That initiative reinforced the value proposition of cloud computing – you can spin up an environment quickly, test out assumptions at minimal cost and succeed quickly or fail fast.
Gaining New Client Insights
Our primary job as a service provider is to meet and exceed the expectations of our clients. We take advantage of many different feedback loops to gain insight into their unique requirements, but cognitive technology and advanced data analytics have the potential to elevate our understanding of our clients’ pain points and even help us to identify trends so we can develop solutions before a problem arises. It’s like the concept of Apple inventing the iPod before any of us knew we needed a pocket-sized device to carry our favorite music. Fintech is allowing our people to gain deeper insights into our clients’ likes, dislikes, behaviors and patterns, which is essential to delivering the world-class service they deserve.