Over the last decade, cash equities trading has experienced a high degree of technological and business consolidation, driven by the downward pressure on margins in cash equities brokerage.
Since the installation of first transatlantic undersea cable, trading technology providers were tasked with simple mandates: Deliver information faster, from as many sources as possible and help investors and market operators to make better decisions and implement them quickly.
Despite astronomical sums being spent by banks on surveillance – almost US$ 740m by 15 surveyed Tier I and Tier II banks alone in the first two years after MAR came into effect in the UK1 – electronic surveillance is still in its infancy, and gaps in efficacy and performance mean that there is appetite for further spending, development and automation.
As the efficacy of long-established cost-savings and efficiency efforts dry up, financial institutions seeking to transform their business models are increasingly looking to automation technologies to support process workflow optimisation.