We started off the new year at HfS with the launch of the Capital Markets Operations Blueprint last week. This is our first coverage of the key dynamics in capital markets and furthers our BFS research on the back of the HfS Mortgage As-a-Service Blueprint mid-last year.
Policies, politics, and structural market challenges are plaguing capital markets firms, raising the stakes in partnerships with service providers
Going into 2017, we find banks and capital markets firms are cautious as they continue to endure a volatile environment with no signs of letting up. Policy ambiguity across the US and European markets, political uncertainty, and structural market changes continue to plague the capital markets industry. Meanwhile, low interest rates and as a consequence, bank margins across sectors have created new waves of cost pressures. Capital markets firms continue to struggle to generate more revenues to counter their rising cost of capital.
To add to this perfect storm, the revenue-generating aspect of this industry is under fire as well. Capital markets firms have had to abandon categories of products due to new regulations. They are more challenged to attract and retain clients that expect different, digitally enabled levels of service with faster turnaround times across the ecosystem, particularly in wealth management. As more big-ticket fines and penalties hit the headlines, public confidence and trust are continuing to erode, and at the same time, the competitor landscape is expanding for the biggest players with the continued success of community banks, regional banks, and fintech disruptors.
Overall, banks and capital markets firms are severely challenged in predicting strategies for long-term sustainability in a changing market and need to have several strategies in play to meet short-term cost pressures. Traditional cost management from cutting back trading desks and providing front-line compensation have not yielded results at the magnitude required to significantly balance profitability.
As a result, we believe that capital markets firms will undergo large-scale operational transformations in 2017 and beyond.
Since the early to mid-2000s, global technology and business services providers have taken over large parts of the back and middle office processes for banks and capital markets clients. They are now in a unique position to help rethink and run more Intelligent Operations as capital markets clients figure out their strategies to tackle these market challenges. Some of the key buyer-service provider dynamics include:
Back Office Processes Continue to Dominate the Services Landscape: The capital markets operations market started a little over a decade ago with back-office BPO processes offshored to IT service providers. Today, these processes are the majority of work engagements, prominent in 63% of contracts in our analysis. Major service areas include clearing and settlement, corporate actions, reconciliations, fund accounting, collateral management, data management and reporting, investor operations, and product control.
- Market Forces and Regulation Stimulating New Demand: With global regulatory bodies placing continual pressure on banks and capital markets firms, there are new areas of opportunity for service providers to step in to help clients meet regulatory compliance requirements in different ways. Regulatory data management and reporting and analytics modeling and model monitoring are some of the biggest areas of growth for service providers.
- Industry Staring at Technology-Driven Change: We see multiple initiatives fighting for prioritization within client stakeholders and service providers’ strategies, all related to technology-enabled service delivery in capital markets’ operational processes. Platform-based services, provided as a utility, are sparking new interest from clients especially as these models promise consolidation and economies of scale across internal LOBs and asset classes. Similarly, clients are also driving automation initiatives within each business, led by robotic process automation and some level of machine learning and predictive analytics to improve operational performance for retained and outsourced functions.
What’s next?
Standardization: We see a sort of “gold rush” for standardization in the foreseeable future of the capital markets operations. Service providers, including new entrants and industry veterans, are in a race to find ways to bring more standardization to overcome the significant challenges in data management. The managing director at a midsize PE firm we interviewed remarked, “Although we all have to do reconciliations, everyone’s built up in a certain way. The challenge for a service provider or market utility is not the actual processing but standardization in the upstream data that has to be fed in from various systems and the downstream outputs to different stakeholders like regulators and clients where the reporting requirements may be different.” Even within the walls of one enterprise client, data metrics, logs, and audit terms and the systems that consume them across businesses are varied. The biggest areas of investment for clients in the next few years will be in consolidating and standardizing processes such as reference data management and reconciliations.
Robotic Process Automation: Along with potential cost savings, one of the biggest business benefits of using intelligent automation technologies is the higher level of accuracy and standardization due to the lack of manual errors. It is no wonder that the new breed of automation tools has caught the attention of capital markets clients. We see a strong appetite for automation with RPA at the forefront. In the next year, we anticipate many more implementations, particularly for processes that have not been offshored yet where big bang savings are more possible. In the medium term, the cognitive capabilities and machine learning projects under way today in areas like due diligence and inquiry management will have matured and created more confidence for conservative buyers. This is a big opportunity for new market entrants to come in with an automation-first strategy for displacing incumbents. The key will be in proving domain knowledge by coming to service buyers with industry-specific use cases and examples; don’t expect them to have done the homework in this emerging area.
Industry Expertise: On the subject of domain experience, we see emerging opportunity for providing ongoing guidance to capital markets clients for the changes in and the impact of regulatory reforms on their operations and compliance needs. They have traditionally sought consultative advice from risk advisories and consulting firms, and our primary research reveals that for many clients, most service providers are not perceived by key client stakeholders as experienced enough to take on those advisory roles. We anticipate more acquisitions and strategic partnerships by service providers to bridge this gap as multiple clients in our research state that they would find value in getting advisory input from experienced operations partners.
Overall, banks and capital markets firm in our Blueprint research highlighted – and evaluated—the need for a collaborative service provider that is willing to take risks on critical new initiatives that they plan to roll out in the next 12-18 months.
Bottom Line: Whether it’s automation-led, pure-play BPO services, platform investments to drive BPaaS and/or market utilities, or bringing experienced consultants to address regulatory concerns, this high-stakes market demands service providers that are willing to take risks and invest for the long term.
For more details –including visuals of the market activity and analyses of the service providers—click here to access and download the HfS Capital Markets Operations Blueprint. The service providers included in this report include Capgemini, Cognizant, EXL, Genpact, HCL, Hexaware, Infosys, NIIT Technologies, Syntel, TCS, Tech Mahindra, WNS and Wipro.
Posted in : BFSI, Finance and Accounting, trends-analysis, vertical-specific-processes
