We hear much about the potential issues arising from energy shortages. The potential impact to Capital Markets Post Trade is huge and management committees should ensure that they have considered the risk that unexpected power outages may create for their businesses.  Some of the more obvious risks may typically tend to attract the most attention,...Read More

Read James Maxfield’s thoughts on this topic here. This article was originally published in Harrington Starr’s Financial Technologist magazine, available here.Read More

Ascendant Strategy has consistently found that the majority – at least 60% – of post trade “total cost of ownership” (TCO) across operations and technology for its clients is made up of people cost. Much of this is resolving processing exceptions by communicating with participants in the transaction, so purely internal changes may only result...Read More

‘The industry spends $131 billion on post-trade settlement and servicing, driven by stubbornly high levels of inter- and intra-firm reconciliation, a lack of operational scale and an archaic and overly complex asset-servicing stack.’ Capital Markets Vision 2022 – Accenture, 2017 This was one of the headlines in the Accenture paper of 2017 titled ‘Capital Markets...Read More

One of the fundamental challenges for any organisation trying to understand their digital asset future is how and what they are looking to offer. The emergence of this new asset class and the technology that underpins it has transformational potential for banks, but how and what to deploy varies wildly depending on where an organisation...Read More

On the 9th of March, the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) at the Bank of England published a ‘Financial Stability in Focus’ paper that laid out their thinking around the emerging world of crypto-assets and decentralised finance (DeFi) (click here). The discussion around these areas has, in my opinion, been dominated by mis-perceptions around what these terms...Read More