Antony Fung

Download PDF with citations

CJC takes a look at how the established 2021 Technology Trends will have a greater impact on the capital markets than ever before.

The capital markets is a unique technical ecosystem, simultaneously at the bleeding edge of technical innovation while at times forced to use technology concepts from a bygone era. There are many reasons for this. The capital markets is a big communications network; you could only get rid of that last serial cable (more recent than you think!) when the final subscriber has moved to your new IP based data source. Additionally, the financial industry is heavily regulated and process-driven; many firms are only beginning to move specific functionality to cloud environments as regulators and internal security policies have evolved.

Conversely, the capital markets can be highly pioneering - leading innovation rather than behind it. In 2020, trends and technology roadmaps were thrown out of the window due to Covid-19. Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 takes the ‘Covid effect’ into account, offering unparalleled relevance. With a focus on three main areas, People Centricity, Location Independence and Resilient Delivery, we have reviewed Gartner’s Top Trends for 2021 and how it affects capital markets firms, not to mention ourselves at CJC.

People Centricity

The Covid-19 pandemic changed how people work and interact with organizations, yet people are still at the centre of all business — we all need digitalized processes to function in today’s environment.

Internet of Behaviours: For our industry, this is about data collection and analytics; the creation of new and exciting data sets, such as non-traditional alternative, along with the appliance of AI. This has been a capital markets driver for years. Of course, these new data sets and systems require powerful infrastructure and databases for data scientists, developers and analysts. These systems are typical of those supported by CJC 24x7 and visualized by our mosaicOA tool. The application of ML and AI techniques to mosaicOA provides even greater value to our clients seeking to drive actionable intelligence from their ecosystem.

Total Experience: Combining the traditional disciplines such as multi-experience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and user experience (UX) into one.

Firms are looking to spin up/down data infrastructure in the cloud, but also have the entire process of the software deployment and configuration completed in minutes. These systems require support during their lifecycle, be it for a week or a year. As firms move to the cloud, the variable hourly > monthly infrastructure costs give increased importance to infrastructure and applications metrics. Clients demand visualizations of their infrastructure and application statistics to assist in cost management. This in many ways is “Everything as a Service” – a total experience service that CJC has been providing to our clients for many years as a trusted managed service provider. Clients have always wanted a ‘one stop shop’ for their support. In this modern era, we have built cloud migration/orchestration tooling focused on capital markets applications. We continually look to improve our monitoring, tooling and reporting to provide an unparalleled experience for our clients.

Location Independence

COVID-19 has shifted where employees, customers, suppliers and organizational ecosystems physically exist. Location independence requires a technology shift to support this new reality of business.

Anywhere Operations: The ability for employees to support their business from anywhere in the world had to happen overnight at many firms and the progress will continue into 2021. This is one area where CJC has led the way for over a decade and why it was routine to adopt our global 24x7 to a home-based workforce in 2020.

Distributed Cloud: This really is the ‘big trend’ of 2021 for many capital markets firms. They are looking to monetize and distribute their data to whoever needs it and wherever it needs to be as customers will operate from different clouds/technologies such as Azure, Google, AWS, On-premise or Hybrid. Firms are looking to solutions like our cloud migration tooling to orchestrate infrastructure and software to distribute data in a fast and robust manner.

Resilient Delivery

This is where many of the above concepts come together and why CJC is heavily involved in the latest technology trends at client sites. We have always been a firm to guarantee a resilient delivery of data.

Intelligent Composable Business: Firms are not just moving to the cloud; they are not lifting and shifting their current infrastructure from physical and recreating it in the cloud, they are using the cloud to transform their business to a new data distribution model. Many firms are looking to decouple from legacy distribution systems and migrate to mainstream concepts available in the cloud, such as Solace or Kafka. A great example of this is how CJC helped a global firm successfully migrate from Tibco to Solace in a record time frame. These systems are then supported by CJCs 24x7 managed service and tooling. Download the case study to learn more!

Summary

2021 in many ways is an epilogue to the abrupt changes placed on businesses in 2020. Covid-19 led to a greater emphasis on public cloud and pushed firms across the capital markets to fully embrace cloud long after many other industries. This emphasis however has merely reduced the timeframe on the industries migration. The requirement for significant data analytics will be easily accommodated by the AI capabilities of the cloud. However, many firms will initiate major transformation projects to achieve a composable business providing distributed data anywhere. These trends have been long prepared for at CJC. For many years we have worked alongside clients to provide solutions around their cloud aspirations and provide tooling and 24x7 support to best support this transition.

- Steve Moreton, Global Head of Product Management, CJC

For more information, please contact: [email protected]