The ‘equitisation’ of complex products is creating opportunities for front-office technologists. The same skills that have helped develop trading platforms for vanilla cash assets are now finding a home in markets that used to be primarily over the counter.
“E-business continues to transform the nature of financial services,” says Anthony Woolley, UK chief information officer at Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB). “It is concerned with both how you price and risk-manage financial products and how you distribute them to your clients. IT is transforming both of those aspects. Firms started to manage risk for very simple products in high volume a decade ago. But the advancing power of technology has allowed it to apply to ever more complex products over time. So there are quite a lot of exciting projects going on at the back end of how e-business is done.”