NEW YORK & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TABB Group says doing “more-for-less” as it applies to capital markets firms in their use of technology can be translated into a single megatrend, a changing of the guard from focusing on speed to one on “smarts” through the improved application of data and analytics. According to Paul Rowady, a TABB principal, the firm’s new data and analytics (DnA) practice leader and author of “From Faster to Smarter: The Single Global Markets Megatrend.” technology is the hinge on which capital markets could swing into a new era with unprecedented levels of innovation.
Market structure reforms and technical innovation led firms to focus mainly on speed for the past 10 years, says Rowady, as trading strategies based largely on speed perpetuated an explosion of additional innovations in computational efficiency, throughput computing, connectivity and data feeds. “The peak of profitability for high-turnover strategies was reached in 2009 but there’s so much more that firms could be harvesting today from technical infrastructure and the increasing “datafication” of everything.”
Rowady says big data has been misunderstood in capital markets. “Just because data use is growing in capital markets does not necessarily mean that data volumes qualify as big data, compared across industries. It’s the consumption and complexity of data that global markets firms need to focus on. With few exceptions, capital markets do not produce much ‘big data.’”
The new research details the business drivers facing firms, including regulatory development and implementation; economic uncertainty and “interventionism”; disruptive technology and hyper-connectivity; velocity of capital flows; and shifting market participants and their demographics, and how they interact in an impact-response cycle. It examines five technology themes: managed services/cloud, high performance computing and solid state; security; unstructured and big data; standards, open source and NoSQL; and information design and visualization. It also identifies the components of a “smart” trading business: improved analytics and reporting; business model right-sizing, upgrading and optimizing infrastructure; data fluency; and, via human capital transformations and process re-engineering, the critical role of culture shifts.
As trading firms continue to offload commoditized activities, TABB believes that adoption of cloud offerings and other managed services will be among the leading maneuvers to combat costs. “In parallel with this adoption, “we see solid-state, multi-disk appliances and other high-performance computational solutions leading the production of analytics for better navigation of the market landscape,” says Rowady.
The 12-page report with 5 exhibits can be downloaded by TABB Group Research Alliance DnA clients and media at http://www.tabbgroup.com/Login.aspx. For more information or to purchase the report, write to info@tabbgroup.com.
About TABB Group
Based in New York and London, TABB Group is the research and consulting firm focused exclusively on capital markets, based on the interview-based, “first-person knowledge” research methodology developed by Larry Tabb.
