Capital markets firms cite data needs and modernization as their top priorities

As part of the reference check process for our HFS Top 10 Capital Markets Services 2022 – Leaders and Formidable Challengers studies, we interviewed 42 business and operations leaders from capital markets firms about their firm’s top priorities for the next 12 to 18 months.

Capital markets are a fragmented set of sub-markets across the sell-side, buy-side, and market infrastructure enablers. The sub-domains are largely united in their palpable need to modernize their businesses, optimize their processes, and drive some semblance of digital customer experience.

Our capital markets respondents indicated their top priorities for the next 12 – 18 months are:

• Use of data as a business asset (71%) – Capital markets firms have a massive need to better manage their data, and they want it to help drive insights, better planning, improved personalization, etc. Some want to monetize it and drive new offerings with it. Whatever the mission, it starts with data modernization and bleeds into cloud.
• Accelerating digital modernization initiatives (71%) – The cloud story for capital markets is data and applications modernization. Firms seeking to modernize and future-proof their operations are embracing cloud—private, hybrid, multi, and, increasingly, public. Workload and application migration for capital markets requires deep domain knowledge, not just cloud expertise.

The Bottom Line. Services providers have a critical role to play in helping capital markets firms make rapid and future-proof progress. Change is afoot in global capital markets.

Whether it be understanding environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements and impact, enabling evolving digital asset ecosystems, delivering much-needed digitization and modernization, or optimizing enhanced operations as new standards like T+1 loom on the horizon—all in the shadow of the great resignation, wage inflation, a waning pandemic, and a looming recession—capital markets firms need to make rapid and future-proof progress. Service providers have a key role to play as essential partners bringing critical advisory, technology, and operations expertise to help capital markets firms across the buy-side, sell-side, and market infrastructure change, grow, and comply.

Explore the HFS Pulse Dashboard

Take a look at the breadth of data in our Pulse Dashboard, which showcases data about current and future demand trends for technology and business services and related emerging technologies. See more here.