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Straddling the Old and the New – Fintech in the Capital Markets

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29 September 2016
Brad Bailey

We are sitting at an extraordinary inflection point in the capital markets. The competitive landscape is in flux as competitors find their way through a maze of constraints. The constraints are well known-increasing regulation, rapidly changing market structure, liquidity challenges, and difficult macroeconomic conditions. There is also a feedback loop with the broader economy; many of the same forces that are constraining the capital markets are creating an unusual political landscape. We have seen this playout with Brexit, and the world awaits the outcome of the US presidential election. These then feedback into the capital market as uncertainty around managing volatility, risk and whether regulation will proceed as expected will be delayed or, radically altered.

For many capital market incumbents: the investment banks, broker-dealers, asset managers, and infrastructure firms are also saddled with extremely complicated legacy systems that are highly siloed, very expensive to run and even more expensive to change. While many are rationalizing systems, in certain areas it is just not possible. In many cases, ancient systems are running broad swaths of the back office, and sit under decades of add-ons, fit-ins, force-ins, and integrate with countless systems internal and external. Capital market firms are often in the habit of creating an abstraction layer above systems to tie more and more data and systems together. This creates a kludgy infrastructure, but it can, and does work.

Given that there are so many challenges, and hence opportunities, we have seen a slew of fintechs increasingly offering capital market solutions. There are those that come from the capital markets and speak the language of the markets. They have grown up in the space and see an opportunity to solve a particular pain point in investment process, trading or operations. There are other fintechs that have entered the vertical from another and are leveraging their data processing, analytical, machine learning, and hardware acceleration prowess in the capital markets.

We have seen fintech disruption in banking, but in the capital markets, so far, it has been much more collaboration than disruption. Fintech firms are bringing unique data, analytic, technology solutions into a highly regulated business. Fintechs that partner with existing firms are offered scale, legitimacy, and clients in a highly risk averse and regulation heavy business. For the brave incumbent firms who are providing capital and nuanced expertise to these innovators, there are rewards: new ways of looking at their business, but more importantly, ready built solutions that they can scale. Overcoming the fear of engaging these firms effectively is a path to finding better and more cost-effective solutions.

In my report, From Financial Technology to Fintech: Trends in Capital Markets, I look at the areas in which the rate of change is greatest, the nature of fintech partnerships in the capital markets and how they are evolving. I look at the pain points in KYC, liquidity, trading, liquidity, collateral and operations. I investigate the growing acceptance of cloud, the importance of leveraging data correctly and analytics and tie these to specific providers with solutions in InvestmentTech, MarketTech, RegTech and AltData. I also look at emerging technologies such as distributed ledger technology, AI, and business models that are looking to remap the capital markets at its core.

Yes, we are at an inflection point and some of the systems out there are kludgy, but in the short term, solving specific business pain points is the key to solving some of the industry’s thorniest problems.

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