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CMI Thought Leadership

CMI Thought Leadership

Accentuating Financial Services Firm & Technology Vendor Competitive Differentiation

In 2013, capital markets consultancy GreySpark Partners identified an opportunity to create a new analysis-, advisory- and research-centric service offering designed to provide buyside firms, financial technology vendors and sellside institutions with a new form of thought leadership content. Now, the service offering – derived from the analysis and research capabilities of GreySpark’s Capital Markets Intelligence practice – provides all manner of global financial services industry participants with professionally assembled and designed research outputs capable of accentuating and competitively differentiating the unique service propositions of business and trading models built upon dynamic, innovative software applications.

Our Value

The continual, strategic review by all manner of financial markets institutions typically results in difficult decision-making objectives, centred around cost reduction and business process efficiency, to replace in-house built or incumbent vendor-dependent systems operating within an overall technology stack that became overtly legacy and no longer fit-for-purpose over time. Likewise, established and start-up financial technology vendors actively proffering pre-trade, at-trade, post-trade and front-to-back operations-focused solutions within the financial services industry often struggle to explicate the benefits case surrounding those products to their target user base.

The CMI Thought Leadership service offering effectively provides buyers or users of trade process, infrastructure and operational performance fintech solutions with the analysis and data required to undertake informed decisions regarding existing technology stack capabilities augmentation or replacement. In doing so, CMI Thought Leadership specifically assists technology vendors with the specialist, client consumer-centric skills required to effectively position and market their solutions offerings to a target user base via the lens of either short-form or long-form online research content production.

Interested in GreySpark's CMI Thought Leadership Services?

In 2013, capital markets consultancy GreySpark Partners identified an opportunity to create a new analysis-, advisory- and research-centric service offering designed to provide buyside firms, financial technology vendors and sellside institutions with a new form of thought leadership content.

The CMI Thought Leadership Service Offering

Bespoke, Technology-centric Analysis & Research for a Global, Specialist Audience

Depending on the business or commercial strategy objectives that they wish to mutually achieve, financial markets firms and fintech vendors alike require specialist research advisory services related to:

  • The definition of a clear, commonly-held message regarding a fintech solution’s functional capabilities, developed in a manner that is designed to clarify or resolve mismatches in the vendor / user relationship;
  • The vendor-agnostic, transparent gathering and collaborative assembly of the necessary datapoints required to evidence the ways in which such mismatches of understanding impede the successful uptake of innovative or new fintech products designed to enhance operational efficiency by their target users; and
  • The production of specialised and professionally designed short-form or long-form research analysis content, published online and designed to maximise the effectiveness of product or use case message delivery to a targeted audience of business-minded readers.

To enable these specialist research advisory needs, the CMI Thought Leadership service offering drills down into the details of the vendor / user solutions capabilities paradigm in order to establish the specifics of:

  • What a technology product or managed service can practically do or not do from both a functional and non-functional perspective;
  • For whom within the financial services technology solutions consumer universe the product or managed service is ideally suited, and for what purposes; and
  • How the product or managed service can be leveraged by a financial services user base to accentuate competitive differentiation or promote the creation of new firm internal or client-facing economies of scale.

CMI Thought Leadership can provide technology-focused financial markets firms and fintech vendors alike with the independently-assembled, neutrally-assessed data and contextual understanding required to:

  • Inform product commercial positioning, functional capabilities design or technology stack integration strategy;

  • Defend or grow product or target client market share;

  • Create or grow existing or new product or client revenue streams; and

  • Showcase the full range of product-specific functional & non-functional capabilities.

Commercially effective, durable, impactful and long-lasting research content outputs – CMI Thought Leadership provides buyers of the service with analysis and advisory that can be used to:

  • Defend or make a business / commercial technology change use case;
  • Inform or educate current or prospective users of a specific product or managed service of its benefits and functional or non-functional capabilities;
  • Market or effectively position a new or re-imagined technology solution’s solutions benefits to a broad or niche global or region-specific user base; and
  • Enhance or revise a technology vendor or financial markets firm’s understanding of who they could or should be selling their product or service to, and how to most effectively deliver that product or service over time.

Delivery

GreySpark has built a robust methodology for thought leadership content assembly and production that is applicable to financial markets and services firm technology users and fintech vendors.

To achieve the analysis and research objectives of both constituent user groups of the CMI Thought Leadership service offering, GreySpark utilises a proprietary set of content production frameworks and methodologies.

Collaboration & Partnership with Established or Start-up Fintech Vendors:

  • GreySpark analysts maintain a continuous dialogue with established and new financial services business process, financial markets trading and regulatory technology vendors.

Strong Relationships with Buyside Firms & Sellside Institutions, including:

  • Tier I to Tier IV corporate and investment banks, custodians and private banks;
  • Asset managers, hedge funds, institutional investors, investment managers and wealth managers;
  • Private equity and venture capital fund investors;
  • Exchange groups, non-bank brokers and electronic brokerage venue operators, and markets and transactions data providers;
  • Region-specific regulatory agencies; and
  • Financial services and technology industry associations.

A Wealth of Hands-on Technology Delivery Experience:

  • GreySpark analysts do not just analyse and produce thought leadership content related to financial markets and services industry use of technology.
  • Instead, the firm also maintains a wide range of technology delivery and implementation teams whose knowledge and expertise generates yet-another set of datapoints that are utilised to support CMI Thought Leadership client analysis and research objectives.

Media

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How to Conquer Dynamic Container Environment Monitoring in Financial Services

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Accelerating GRC Maturity with AI

The pace of digital transformation in most investment firms quickened significantly at the onset of the pandemic, as work-from-home orders led firms to facilitate and extend remote working for staff.…
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The Future of Broking

A black swan is a rare phenomenon in nature and one that lends its name to once-in-a-generation, severe, unexpected events for that reason. The last few years, however, have seen…
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1 Jun, 2023

Accelerate Your Journey to the Cloud with Intelligent Monitoring

As financial institutions move to cloud, they need more intelligent monitoring to manage a complex IT topology. The use of cloud technology by financial institutions is well established, but, while…
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19 May, 2023

Making Sense of Fixed Income Market Data Madness

It was during a presentation by the makers of the popular app-based game Candy Crush Saga at a Cloud Provider event in 2017 that Vincent Grandjean began to formulate a…
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Integrated Trader Surveillance – Identifying the Asymptote

Surveillance – specifically trader surveillance – in financial services institutions remains an area of focus for Compliance professionals in 2023. Generally comprising a combination of trade and communications (voice and…
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The Clearing & Settlement of Cryptoassets Trading

Cryptocurrencies experienced significant depreciation in 2021, with the total market capitalisation of all cryptocurrencies dropping from a peak of around USD 2.5tn in May to around USD 1.3tn by the…
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27 Mar, 2023

Regulatory Aspects of Trading Digital Assets

Few parts of the world have embraced virtual assets like Asia. Indeed, the region has some of the highest adoption and growth rates for cryptocurrency, which has left regional regulators…
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