When it comes to technology investment, especially in the securities finance industry, firms are laser-focused on driving down costs, maximizing efficiency and keeping up with evolving regulations, writes DataLend’s chief information officer Ken DiGiglio in the research publication The Purple.
When most technology investment by firms these days is directed toward these must-haves, emerging technology that may offer a competitive advantage oftentimes takes a back seat. Technologies such as machine learning and blockchain are real and valid and exciting, and they have the potential to truly revolutionize the way we all operate, but in all likelihood, they will be more slowly adopted by securities finance market participants than some of the buzz would suggest.
That said, a technology provider such as EquiLend is ideally placed to incorporate these revolutionary technologies into services already used by firms throughout the industry—such as DataLend, NGT, Post-Trade Suite (PTS) or EquiLend Clearing Services— allowing our clients to benefit from this cutting-edge technology with minimal to no resource and monetary spend.
In fact, we are doing just that. We are currently building enhancements to both NGT and PTS that leverage machine learning, and we expect to extend the technology to our other services as well. We are also actively working on cloud deployments as well as implementing a shared ledger model that can be easily extended to leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT) and “smart contract” frameworks in the future.