Across all industries globally, companies face a legacy challenge: how to make the most of new technologies while keeping the existing business running profitably – often with an agenda to lower costs. The capital markets industry has a distinctive set of challenges: the period of growth, merger and acquisition activity, regulatory change and shifting business imperatives witnessed over the last 30 years has left many with overly complex and costly operating models and architectures, often duplicative and siloed in nature. At the same time, cloud-based, data-centric technologies offer new growth opportunities.
 
We examined the distinctive ways in which the capital markets industry deals with these challenges. To quantify this, we gathered data and commentary from 120 firms, including broker-dealers, asset management firms, wealth advisory firms, private banks and investment banks, across the major industry regions globally and compared these to other industries. Five themes – cloud, data-centricity, process ecosystems, custom engineering and security – were common to solving legacy platform challenges and reducing complexity.
 
Global markets players will need to invest in architecture modernization to remain competitive, and this will require a multi-year focus. The prize is likely to be a 20-30% run rate reduction in IT spend and a lower change budget going forward on a like-for-like basis – plus the ability to cope with capacity volatility, a prize long desired by the industry – as well as security from external and internal threats.


 
For more information please contract:
  
Owen Jelf, Global Lead Capital Markets
owen.jelf@capco.com 
 
David Kay, Partner UK Capital Markets
david.kay@capco.com 
 
George Black, US Lead Capital Markets
george.black@capco.com 
 
Andreas Pfeil, Europe Lead Capital Markets
andreas.pfeil@capco.com 
 
Steve Halliwell, Asia-Pacific Lead Capital Markets
steven.halliwell@capco.com