How innovation can improve operations and prevent financial losses

Operational workflows have consistently shifted and expanded due to increased product innovation, complexity, and data volumes, leading to operational, audit, risk, and even revenue loss and reputational issues.

As you consider new ways to transform the middle and back offices into more efficient and resilient processes, there are three key questions: How much money is wasted on inadequate data and antiquated processes? How expensive can a loss event be? And how much of your customers’ portfolio value is lost each year?

One Nostro reconciliation detection can create a loss event in 2,500 different places across the trading and reporting lifecycle. And just a 1.5% fund fee can easily translate into your customers losing a whopping 22% of their returns. Is that acceptable?

A disciplined focus on operationalising data, optimising people’s time, and improving processes through innovation can enable firms to achieve greater long-term technology project success while reducing operational risk.

Trusting your data

The variety of data firms must deal with daily comes in different sizes, shapes, formats, and volumes. It can come at you fast, and it’s constantly evolving along with your requirements.

The average medium-sized asset manager takes in an average of 59 data feeds to drive different reconciliation and operations functions – feeds that have no consistent standards and frequently change without warning and in unpredictable ways.

At the same time, regulators plan to scrutinise your data more closely than ever. Yet many firms still struggle to ensure their data is safe, fast, and trusted by your operations, regulators, executives, and customers.

Modernising your operations

Complex legacy technology infrastructures, disconnected workflows, and poor data quality make businesses expensive and inefficient to run.

Operational resiliency is key to accelerating settlement cycles and meeting regulatory priorities. That means:

• Automating, controlling, and optimising workflows
• Reducing exceptions
• Simplifying compliance and regulatory reporting
• Dynamically connecting with entities
• Aggregating and normalising complex data
• Transforming any size, shape, or volume of data
• Gaining more value from your entire trade lifecycle
  
  

Scaling your business

Commoditised, routine, and time-intensive tasks can quickly drain operational resources and make it difficult to scale. Many firms add more people to keep pace with growth rather than automate and optimise.

The problem is that knowledgeable middle- and back-office people are hard to find and retain. More than 60% of sell-side and buy-side executives said that finding the right domain experts was the biggest constraint on their tech project success, according to our recent survey with Adox Research.

But when operations and tech teams are freed up to work on value-generating tasks – rather than struggling with complex new data challenges or scrambling to respond to critical events caused by data or process failures – growth is almost a given.

Handing over connectivity, data transformation, reconciliation, regulatory reporting, and application hosting to specialists isn’t just about saving costs or maintaining a lean headcount. It’s about empowering your business to scale without hiring more staff and ensuring your operations can flexibly support business and market changes as they happen.

Making an impact with innovation

With modernised operations driven by innovation, firms can achieve:

• a 50% reduction in exceptions
• 97% time savings to onboard new controls
• 3000% increased control onboarding capacity
• a 86% reduction in late regulatory reporting

It’s a special kind of technology partner that can provide the capacity to move more than $20 trillion in assets and report millions of CAT eligible orders every day – and give you access to more than 80 ready-to-go regulatory and trading connections and over 350 out-of-the-box data adapters and transformations.

Gaining total visibility and control

When the consequences of poor data and inefficient processes start showing up as errors, costs, and a lack of transparency, customers and regulators will not like what they see.

The power of data, automation, connectivity, and cloud-based managed service models are the keys to optimising operations as technology, industry workflows, and the availability of specialised talent evolve.

You can achieve perpetual operational resiliency by modernising your approach, always efficient and constantly advancing.

To hear how Gresham is helping firms improve their operations, visit our team at SIFMA Ops (booth #111) May 17-18th in Phoenix. Book a 15-minute meeting here.