Broadridge Financial Solutions is addressing the complexity of financial markets and burden of regulation with a mutualisation strategy that builds products once for many clients and includes core A,B,C,D building blocks – artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud and digitalisation. To find out more about the company’s approach, we talked to Samir Pandiri, president of Broadridge International with responsibility for the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions.
Pandiri describes the key problems for asset managers as regulatory compliance and pressure on fees. For capital markets participants regulation is also a problem, particularly as it becomes more global and makes increasing demands on the business model that can be expensive to implement. He says: “The capital markets ecosystem has become very complex. Technology is often old, it is hard to make changes and difficult to comply with new regulations in a cost-effective way. There is also more demand for data and insight. If you can help clients solve these issues that is a win.”
Broadridge’s strategy to achieve this is based on a philosophy of mutualisation that builds solutions once to serve many customers and provides all with updates and new functionality. Customers can customise the solutions, and Broadridge helps meet their data needs by incorporating application programming interfaces (APIs) in its solutions.
Core themes, or building blocks, of these solutions are, as mentioned above, AI, blockchain, cloud and digitalisation, in terms of how to disrupt the market and mutualise this for many customers. Pandiri comments: “We continually question whether we are using the latest technology to enable clients’ business.”
Broadridge is building its AI and machine learning capability internally and has developed a reconciliation engine using AI. More solutions are in the pipeline, although Pandiri notes that these, and any further developments, must be designed with the purpose of helping clients work in a faster and easier way.
The company has its own blockchain technology as well as a partnership with Digital Asset to extend its options. The technology has been implemented to provide a solution for Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD) regulation and the company is looking at how the technology could be used to make compliance with other regulations more innovative and efficient.
Pandiri says Broadridge is a big user of the cloud and, dependent on client perspectives, the company can offer either public or private cloud environments. He adds: “Firms are moving more apps to the cloud, but where they store data depends on policies and procedures, so we are seeing a lot of hybrid solutions with apps in the cloud and data stored in internal databases.”
Digitalisation and data transformation are the final building block, with Broadridge focussing on data management, dissemination and insight. For the asset management market, by way of example, the company offers Global Market Intelligence, an integrated data and analytics platform that expands users’ insight into global funds and ETFs. The company has over 100 fund managers on the platform and sees many other use cases for data driven business solutions.
Broadridge has developed its strategy, solutions and skillsets over time, supported by about 30 acquisitions over the past 10 years. Pandiri says: “The world is full of great ideas to tap in to. We are always looking for strategic partnerships and acquisitions we can tuck in. This strategy has been very successful for Broadridge and gives the company access to talent in an efficient way.”
Going forward, he concludes: “Change will be quick over the next 10 years and things will be very different. I am not sure what the change will look like, but if Broadridge can continue to access the best talent and ideas, and deliver what is best for clients, we should be in good shape in 10 years’ time.”
Subscribe to our newsletter
