Digitisation of Pre-Trade Client Workflows – How Will Standardisation and Automation Improve Efficiency?

Perhaps surprisingly in today’s capital markets, much of the process of negotiating trades between counterparties – for all but the simplest of products – still relies heavily on the kind of inefficient manual processes that have been around for twenty years or more, such as phone calls, emails, extensive re-keying of data, and multiple copies of files and spreadsheets being shared back and forth.

This modus operandi may have been adequate in the past. But technology, the markets, regulation and customer expectations have all moved on. Today’s environment demands faster, smarter services combined with better risk controls and audit. So why do these inefficient workflows persist and what is being done to drive improvement?

In this second Financial Markets Insights report in The Realization Group and ipushpull’s ‘Data as a Service’ series, Mike O’Hara discusses the challenges around eliminating manual processes in the pre-trade negotiation environment, with Richard Turner of Insight Investment, Andrew Mosson of JP Morgan, Ayaz Haji of Goldman Sachs, Chris Scott of TP ICAP, Andy Ross of CurveGlobal, Craig Butterworth of Symphony, and Matthew Cheung of ipushpull, and looks at how introducing standardisation of workflow tools and messaging can ultimately drive automation and help firms achieve greater efficiency, improve client communication and reduce operational risks.