Fintech Innovator in the Capital Markets Space of Investment Research and Client Servicing By CIOReview Team

Fintech Innovator in the Capital Markets Space of Investment Research and Client Servicing

CIOReview Team | Wednesday, 07 December 2016, 04:38 IST

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Lost in the current debate over whether investment research should be paid for in hard dollars as opposed to soft-dollar commissions is the fact that investment research and stock-broking businesses are under enormous pressure to boost their cost competitiveness and quality of service offering. ANALEC strongly believes technology and software can go a long way to address both cost competitiveness and quality of service from brokers to their demanding institutional investor clients. Headquartered in Singapore, with offices in India (Gurgaon, Haryana), Taiwan and the United States, ANALEC is a provider of a wide range of technology platforms in the investment research and client servicing domain that helps to address the structural challenges facing broker-dealers and helping them fight off headwinds successfully. ANALEC’s range of enterprise software platforms at the core is working to make broker-dealers more competitive in terms of cost of business, as well as improve the competitiveness of their service offering. ANALEC’s leadership team brings over 80 years of combined experience in the capital markets domain which has been critical in their ability to engage with the customers to solve the business challenges and deliver a world class service.

“ANALEC has been playing technology change-agents within investment banks and broker dealers to make them more profitable and sustainable. In fact, we are quite unique in our product offering as the only firm globally that has addressed the challenges across investment research and client servicing in an integrated offering” says Indy Sarker, CEO, ANALEC.

Technology solutions across research and client servicing
ANALEC with its research management technology and CRM offering is helping banks and brokers become more efficient and engage their clients better. Its research management solution addresses the entire value-chain of investment research, right from content authoring, workflow and compliance management, to content distribution; including bespoke client requests. It helps brokers engage new media as well as serve content to the mobile consumer in the most “actionable” form. On the CRM front, the challenges of customer service are quite unique compared to other industries. The “service” is about delivering the best investment ideas to the client base, based on their interests, risk appetite; including access to a range of related professional services (as part of the overall service pledge). ANALEC’s CRM platform for investment banks and broker-dealers addresses transparency and accountability across the value-chain of client servicing and links into the research technology offering to create an integrated solution.

Using technology to make the investment research business competitive
Investment research-as-a-service from broker-dealers to their institutional client arefacing deep structural challenges. Such structural challenges (both market led as well as regulation induced) are raising questions on the engagement models of brokers as well as their product and service offering. ANALEC Research Wise-as-a-software platform addresses the entire value chain of the investment research organization, with a purpose to make analysts more productive,improving the external visibility of the research product in the market and raising the client engagement quotient of the research product. “ANALEC’s research platform helps to produce research in the shortest possible period of time, meets all regulatory compliance and internal organizational controls, allows for generation of ideas from the various investment screening tools, and provides a more targeted and visible distribution platform to customers,” details Lalit Raj, VP of Client Engagement.

In the aspects of productivity and efficiencies, ANALEC’s componentization capabilities on the research product ensures each investment idea gets the maximum visibility across the client base and also a lengthening of the shelf-life of each investment idea with greater acceptance across the client base. Additionally, ANALEC vastly improves the content distribution capabilities of the client organizations, taking it beyond merely delivering PDFs as attachments and links via emails, by engaging the mobile consumer, across social media and other mobile delivery platforms. 

Content consumption is increasingly going digital where the advent of the mobile consumer is adding to the challenge to gain mind-share and “recall value” for the customers. 

“We at ANALEC believe that this business challenge requires smart technology solutions wherein both the investment research and client servicing CRM capabilities have to be looked at in an integrated offering to deliver the best results. This is where ANALEC really stands out in the market place and our ability to innovate swiftly,” says Colin Stone, CTO.

Addressing Client Servicing Challenges
When it comes to broker-dealers addressing the client servicing challenges of their institutional clients, ANALEC believes that a conventional CRM approach fails to deliver the necessary results. ANALEC’s ClientManager suite is specifically geared to address the client servicing challenges of the institutional investor market place with the embedded logic and workflow intelligence of the broker-dealer organization and their client service function.

The various touch-points of the customer service experience involve (a) delivering investment ideas to clients; (b) taking client enquiries and undertaking bespoke work on their behalf; (c) delivering analysts access to clients; (d) delivering corporate access to clients; (d) tracking research readership stats; (e) proactive account management and management reporting tools to ensure highest levels of “service relevance” at the client end.

ANALEC’s CRM solutions achieve all of the above by providing a seamless and integrated experience across all communication mediums with the client base (i.e., phone systems, emails, stock settlement systems etc.), capturing important intelligence to facilitate client servicing as well as ensure service level accountability across the organization. 

Apart from these, account management still remains a huge challenge within a broker-dealer or investment bank on account of multiple layers of client service requirements as well as the inefficient information flows from one part of the service organization to another. Consequently, an integrated holistic view on a client organization across the service spectrum remains a huge challenge. Added to that, the regulatory pressures relating to un-bundling of commission payments (from institutional clients to brokers) and the impending MiFID II regulation in Europe, need for superior management reporting and accountability will grow in its importance at broker-dealers, while impacting service levels to their end clients.

Institutional stock-broking CRM – Unique business challenges
Unlike more conventional CRM solutions in this space, ANALEC’s offering goes way beyond mere contact management and focuses on the profitability of each client organization over time, which is becoming increasingly important at the management level within the broker-dealers and investment banks, driven by cost consideration regulatory changes as encompassed in MiFID II in Europe. ANALEC’s data analytics capabilities within the CRM, drives actionable decision-making at the management level, that is exceptional in many ways to what is already there in the market place for capital markets professionals. By taking away the tedium normally associated with CRMs and their maintenance, ANALEC’s solution ensures powerful insights and analytics to help both the organization as well as the individual service team members to leverage use intelligence in the client service process.

Transforming the world of stock-broking
ANALEC believes that technology and its application goes a long way to address the long-run competitive challenges of the broker-dealer industry and that their product suites are all designed to achieve positive results for the customers. ANALEC has built its value proposition to its customers on the basis of its deep domain knowledge of the customer’s business and associated challenges coupled with world class execution and customer engagement skills. “We believe these two facets have helped ANALEC to build long-term and sustainable working relationships with its customer base. With a global market opportunity of close to US$1.0 bn, we are the only firm globally that has an integrated investment research and CRM technology offering, increasingly helping us to win both the capability as well as total-cost-of-ownership considerations in the market place,” explains Indy Sarker, CEO.

Over the next 5 years ANALEC is focused on geographically growing its customer footprint in North America and Europe, where ANALEC has been under-invested. Over the long-run, ANALEC is looking to re-engineer its product suites to deliver similar value-add to other industry verticals, where some of the generic capabilities embedded within ANALEC’s platforms could be of value.

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