Philippe Denis, the chief digital officer of BNP Paribas Securities Services, built his first computer in 1978 at the age of 18, and it is this commitment to embracing new technology that is driving his work at the French company, from his innovative use of big data to hosting brainstorming sessions on blockchain technology.
Once regarded as national treasures, over the past few years many exchanges have been evolving into cross-border operations, focused on capturing larger market shares. Following this wave of consolidation and collaboration, however, it still remains to be seen whether bigger really means better.
A single platform for securities settlement in Europe and the continued growth of e-commerce will soon out-date the market infrastructures as they exist. Frances Faulds looks at how market infrastructures are reinventing themselves and redesigning their services to remain relevant.
Much work has been done to standardise and automate fund processing, with several commercial solutions available, but the cost of processing fund transactions is still significantly higher than for bonds or equities and this is hampering critical mass. Is a more centralised market infrastructure needed to tackle processing costs? Writer Frances Maguire
Banks' back offices were exposed by the recent crisis as inefficient, lacking in scalability and ripe for increased regulatory scrutiny. Policy-makers and regulators, meanwhile, began to call for the creation of centralised industry utilities, in a bid to reduce the systemic risk associated with the trading, processing and clearing of a variety of complex products.
In the wake of the collapse of two major banks - Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns - global custodian banks are persuading increasingly wary hedge fund managers to consider placing some of their assets into their relatively safe hands, rather than risk placing everything with prime brokers. Writer Frances Maguire