Research Post

UX design and front office transformation

UX design and front office transformation

29 January 2015

Strategic change: UI legacy trade capture systems integration.

The pressures being put on banks to change by shareholders, regulators and clients all converge on one single point – the trader GUI.

The complexity and diversity of trading technology within banks – in combination with legacy organisational structures – present significant risks to effective re-engineering of the trading platform.

Rather than allowing this to remain as a bottleneck to change, Riskcare’s breadth of expertise and perspective enables our clients to see this as the starting point for transformation.

Next-generation UIs developed with UX design methods enable stakeholders to visually consider all of these new variables in the same place at the same time – creating a springboard for change.

 

FRONT OFFICE UX CHANGE DRIVERS

COST REDUCTION

Regulatory changes limiting banks’ ‘house’ trading activity and the market initiatives to push OTC to cleared using standardised contracts has caused banks to focus on their cost base and the costs of each trade.

Where margins are now less than has previously been the case and profits are dependent on client activity, the need to consolidate business lines, systems and support staff has become critical.

This presents a significant opportunity for investment in UI and supporting systems – where a cost reduction can be clearly and unequivocally proven from the investment.

Although such investment is often complicated by the need to retire existing systems in order to achieve the saving, there has been a shift in expectations of what can be achieved.

With declining margins, the need to consolidate business lines can hamper the process – in some cases even causing it to fail.

REGULATORY

The initial wave of regulatory change is over, banks have implemented solutions or outsourced their regulatory reporting requirements to meet MiFID, DF and EMIR.

Yet the pressure on banks to improve their ability to monitor market risk, collateral requirements and conduct risk remains – in order to avoid reputational damage and costs arising from poor risk visibility and weak trading controls.

Much of this is being addressed by moving control of trading activity away from traders to teams such as Product Control, but this is costly and can introduce inefficiency and capacity limits into the trading workflow.

Many banks are now looking at how the trading workflows need to change to incorporate the required controls and how the front office can be provided access to data on risk, collateral and capital requirements.

CROSS ASSET

The requirement to reduce trading costs and focus on clients creates the opportunity for UX design to create a differentiator.

In order to service clients effectively, trader/sales teams need to be able to operate across a spectrum of asset classes, which is not generally supported by the legacy trade capture that aligned to single-product desks.

A UI that therefore integrates with legacy trade capture systems and yet provides the end user with the ability to operate seamlessly across multiple asset classes has the potential to be a considerable commercial benefit.

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