FinTech Barbarians at the Gates: MarketTech 2015 - TabbFORUM

TabbForum’s MarketTech 2015 Conference, on October 21 in New York, focused on major initiatives, trends and innovations in the Financial Technology sector, from massive utility projects like the Securities Industry’s Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), to disruptive technologies like block chain and machine learning, the evolving face of data management and analytics to potential cost-slashing solutions for managing the huge amount of reference data in the Financial Services Industry.  Significant disruption is coming to the financial services industry and these disruptions were reinforced in all of the panels and interviews.

The MarketTech Conference zeroed in on a number of key issues which will have a dramatic impact on the future evolution of financial market infrastructure.  These topics included the CAT program, industry data utilities, the role of latency and analytics, managing massive data sets and how financial technology providers are evolving to manage the fast moving change.

The CAT: Historic Industry Undertaking

One of the biggest technology programs rippling through the financial industry is the CAT program, a topic that was discussed by the first panel at TABB’s MarketTech conference.  CAT will replace FINRA’s Order Audit Trail System (OATS) and significantly expands data reporting requirements across the industry. Discussing the initiative were four of the then six final bidders to provide the CAT facility, including representatives from Thesys Technologies, Computer Sciences Corporation, SunGard and BuckleySandler LLP.

The Continued Importance of Reference Data

The recent unveiling of a reference data facility being built by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley still reverberating through the industry.  Larry Tabb and Philipe Chambadal with SmartStream discussed the initiative and its potential impact on the reference data industry including potential cost reductions exceeding $3 billion in its first year of operation.  One key takeaway was that of itself the reference data facility could have a tremendous impact within the market it could provide the foundation for even more fundamental change in the longer term.

The Role of Latency in Analytics

Although debate around low latency typically focuses on trading applications, analytics is quickly becoming an area where the industry is focusing its development efforts.  The massive size of data now collected by financial participants, in part required by regulatory reporting, requires latency sensitive solutions for analytics.  The bigger the data set the faster the computational regime to analyze that data in a time sensitive manner.  Representatives from Thomson Reuters, Sand Hill East Ventures and Oppenheimer & Co. examined many of the factors around low latency analytics discussed how these factors will impact future developments.

Solutions for Information Intensive Industries

Information intensive industries require significant technology infrastructure that can be flexible, fast and scalable, factors that have attracted the attention of Google within the financial industry.  A special armchair interview Corre Elston from Google Cloud Solutions discussed many of these factors and how Google is approaching the needs of the financial industry with specialized solutions that provide scalable and on demand solutions.

The New Face of Change

The final panel of the data convened to discuss innovation and disruption.  Participating on the panel were representatives from Incapture Technologies, Deutsche Bank, Symbiont.io and Digital Reasoning.  This panel focused on enterprise platform technologies, natural language processing, machine learning, blockchain and how banks are developing solutions by establishing innovation labs.