Generative artificial intelligence (gen A.I.) has made a big splash in the securities industry and many firms and providers are exploring how to apply this game-changing technology to data, analytics, accounting, databases, cloud services, modeling, and operations for wealth and asset management, investment banking, and securities transactions. Industry participants are also applying gen A.I. to unstructured data, client engagements, corporate actions, and manual tasks and systems. The winner in this category must demonstrate how its gen A.I. solution greatly improved a key operation for financial institutions or led to a breakthrough.
Optimizing collateral management has come into sharp focus for many buy-side firms especially as they have had to revamp their infrastructures to meet new regulatory regimes. Advances via distributed ledger technology (DLT) and artificial intelligence (A.I.) are easing workflows and compliance burdens. This award honors the provider, consultant, or internal IT organization that has been the most effective in helping buy-side operations staff achieve higher levels of internal efficiency in the oversight of collateral.
This award honors the provider that delivers an outstanding suite of securities operations solutions tailored for buy-side institutions — including asset managers, investment firms, wealth funds, insurance firms, and pension funds and other asset owners. Solutions may be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, fully outsourced, or delivered via a hybrid model, and should support firms navigating increasingly complex portfolios, regulatory environments, and data ecosystems. The award is meant to reward the provider whose ambitious, enterprise-wide offerings have exceeded expectations.
This award celebrates the provider that has streamlined the complexity and improved the process of client reporting. The winner will demonstrate that it has improved the customization, look, and feel, and delivery of reports for many kinds of clients and portfolios. The award also recognizes progress in automating reports, managing source data, monitoring the status of productions, and clarity in performance reporting. Innovative uses of AI technologies will be taken into consideration.
This award category focuses on the next chapter in cloud computing – cloud-native advances that are paving the way for digital transformations and other evolutionary strategies. This category is open to managed service and cloud-native solutions providers, and to companies that offer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS); platform-as-as-service (PaaS); and software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations.
Corporate actions processing is on a new evolutionary path as firms make greater demands for speed, accuracy, and resiliency. This award spotlights the provider that has incorporated industry standards, advanced automation, intelligent data management, ESG data, and applied emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning to transform corporate actions workflows. Nominees should demonstrate how their solution helps clients reduce risk, minimize manual intervention, and accelerates decision-making via AI-driven insights, predictive processing, or exception handling playing key roles. The winner in this category will have helped its clients move closer to fully automated, straight through processing, and real-time responsiveness, even amid growing event complexity and data fragmentation.
This award shines the spotlight on the provider that has achieved a new level of modernization via a financial technology solution for middle- and back-office post-trade operations. Eligible areas of consideration include intelligent automation, real-time processing, distributed ledger technology, predictive analytics, and other emerging technologies that push the boundaries of what's possible in securities operations. The winner will demonstrate that its pioneering solution represents a genuine leap forward—eliminating manual processes, driving unprecedented efficiency, or solving problems in entirely new ways.
The winning solution must enable firms to proactively identify, mitigate, prevent and recover from cybersecurity incidents while maintaining operational continuity and regulatory compliance. Eligible solutions should showcase advanced capabilities in threat detection, incident response, data protection, and system recovery, tailored specifically to the unique challenges of the capital markets environment. This category recognizes providers that set a new standard in resilience, empowering firms to operate securely in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
This category rewards the provider that excels in delivering comprehensive data aggregation capabilities. The winning solution must demonstrate excellence in collecting, normalizing, and centralizing data from diverse internal and external sources, enabling firms to establish a single source of truth across the enterprise.
Nominees should showcase innovation in handling structured and unstructured data, real-time aggregation, and support for complex data governance requirements. This includes the ability to aggregate and harmonize data across public and private markets, including private equity and other alternative asset classes, where transparency, lineage, and timeliness of data are increasingly vital.
This category celebrates solutions that help middle and back-office operations overcome data fragmentation, enhance decision-making, and drive operational efficiency.
This award spotlights the most effective and innovative solution for seamless data integration. The winning solution must enable firms to aggregate, harmonize, and manage data from diverse sources, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and accessibility across systems, workflows, and internal teams at end-user firms. Nominees should demonstrate excellence in facilitating interoperability, reducing data silos, and enhancing decision-making through advanced integration capabilities such as application programming interfaces (APIs), advancement in AI, cloud-based technologies, and real-time synchronization. This category celebrates solutions that empower firms to unlock the full potential of their data and drive operational efficiency.
Managing data across sources, formats, and asset classes to get the most out of it for securities operations is an ongoing challenge for all financial services firms. Data that is optimized will yield multiple benefits for securities operations and beyond. This award honors the provider that has demonstrated it can help firms organize, manage, and leverage their multiple data sources to optimize their value and pave the way for greater advancements to come.
This award salutes the provider that delivers comprehensive, accurate, and timely original data to support securities operations. The winner serves as a primary source for market data, reference data, pricing, corporate actions, indices, and other essential data sets. The top provider in this category offers broad global coverage, seamless access across asset classes, and a user-friendly experience that reduces operational risk and enables clients to make confident decisions.
This award recognizes the leading solution that excels in streamlining and optimizing derivatives processing. Nominees must demonstrate superior capabilities in managing the full lifecycle of derivatives, including trade capture, clearing, settlement, collateral management, and regulatory compliance. Nominees should emphasize their achievements in innovation that enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, while addressing the complexities of listed, over-the-counter (OTC), and non-cleared derivatives. This category celebrates solutions that empower market participants to navigate the evolving derivatives landscape with operational excellence.
This award salutes the most innovative and effective solution for managing the processing lifecycle of digital assets including settlement, reconciliation, and compliance. Nominees must demonstrate capabilities in facilitating the seamless handling of cryptocurrencies, tokenized securities, and other blockchain-based assets. Nominees should also showcase advancements in scalability, security, interoperability, and integration with traditional financial systems. This category celebrates solutions that enable market participants to embrace digital assets confidently and efficiently, driving adoption and operational excellence in this emerging sector.
This award recognizes the provider that is a leader in offering strong fraud detection and prevention capabilities for capital markets firms. Eligible solutions may address real-time transaction monitoring, anomaly detection, identity verification, account takeover prevention, payment fraud, or insider threat detection. The winner will offer proof that its solution helps firms protect clients and operations from financial and reputational harm.
This award commends the provider that has achieved operational breakthroughs for essential clearing and settlement operations. Eligible areas for consideration are trade matching and confirmation, settlement processing, fails management, cross-border settlement, T+1 optimization, real-time settlement capabilities, and clearing and settlement initiatives for digital assets. The winner will demonstrate how its solution helps firms achieve greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency in completing transactions across markets and asset classes.
This award applauds the provider applying machine learning to enhance securities operations. Eligible applications include predictive analytics, anomaly detection, pattern recognition, data classification, forecasting, or intelligent automation that learns and improves over time. The winner will need to show measurable impact in areas such as trade processing, risk management, surveillance, compliance, or operational efficiency.
The middle office plays an important role in optimizing securities operations across the trading enterprise. The winner in this category will be chosen from the ranks of middle-office operations providers that offer IT resource management services, risk management, risk data analytics, client and security master database support, and services for the coding, configuration, and verification of transactions.
The middle and back-offices are no longer autonomous groups existing independently of each other. They are linked by multiple operations serving multiple assets, which would be hurt by a siloed approach. This award will spotlight the Ops offering that helps firm facilitate more efficient integration between middle- and back-office applications, particularly IT innovations that eliminate manual systems, legacy solutions and pave the way for operational efficiency.
Operational risk permeates everything that a financial services firm does, including securities trading and all the steps needed to complete a transaction. This award will reward the provider that has shown the most creativity in mitigating operational risk whether it is related to onboarding and KYC challenges, reputational concerns, margining and collateral management woes, data mismanagement, disaster recovery/business continuity, corporate governance, and other issues that may hamper operations.
Outsourcing plays a key role for many facets of securities operations. This category honors the provider that offers valuable, reliable, cost-effective and efficient outsourced services to the buy side. The winner in this category will be honored for offering the highest levels of reliability, security and adaptability, and for demonstrating capabilities for rapid implementations and flexible consumer models.
Nominees in this category must demonstrate how their solution effectively enables clients to evaluate and optimize their investment strategies, operational efficiencies, and client outcomes through advanced analytics, real-time insights, and comprehensive reporting capabilities. Nominees should demonstrate excellence in leveraging data visualization, predictive analytics, and benchmarking tools to deliver actionable insights that drive decision-making and enhance portfolio performance. This category honors solutions that set new standards for transparency, precision, and strategic value in performance analysis.
This award celebrates the provider with a proven record of offering optimal performance measurement capabilities that help firms evaluate and communicate investment results. Eligible solutions have made advances in returns calculation, portfolio and composite performance, attribution analysis for equity and fixed-income portfolios, benchmark comparisons, ex-post risk measurement, or GIPS compliance. The winner will exemplify how a provider helps clients achieve accuracy, efficiency, and clarity in measuring and reporting performance.
This award recognizes the provider delivering specialized expertise and customized support for capital markets firms. Eligible services include technology implementation, operational consulting, systems integration, data strategy, quantitative development, or staff augmentation across traditional and alternative asset classes. The winner will demonstrate how its tailored approach helps clients solve complex challenges and achieve measurable results.
This award recognizes the provider delivering innovative reconciliation capabilities for securities operations. Eligible solutions may address cash, position, transaction, or inter-system reconciliation across traditional and digital assets. Solutions leveraging AI, machine learning, or automation to accelerate exception management and reduce manual effort are encouraged to apply. The winner will demonstrate how its solution helps firms achieve accuracy, efficiency, and scalability in their reconciliation processes.
This award recognizes the most impactful and innovative solutions that excel in meeting critical financial governance, risk management, and compliance needs and supports regulatory technology (RegTech) initiatives. Eligible offerings must showcase their ability to streamline compliance, enhance regulatory reporting, and address evolving requirements, such as anti-money laundering (AML), economic sanctions, and global financial regulations. Nominees should present how their technology supports firms across equities, fixed income, and derivatives markets, enabling participants to meet regulatory demands efficiently while driving operational excellence. In addition, solutions that help firms focus on relevant aspects of regulatory, legal, data, social, and IT management excellence are also eligible. This category affirms RegTech providers that deliver cutting-edge solutions to help firms navigate the complexities of today’s regulatory landscape.
Keeping up with regulatory reporting requirements is an ongoing burden for financial services firms that is only going to become more challenging. Automating processes across an enterprise is daunting for firms, and the industry is exploring a variety of models to support regulatory technology (RegTech). The surge in ESG-based investing has also created a new area of concern for firms that need to prove to investors they are not engaged in greenwashing. This award honors the solutions provider that has made a commitment to advancing data integrity and data governance, ending repetitive processes, and streamlining reporting across the enterprise and to regulators.
The collateral management complex involves many participants including sell-side firms that must work closely in conjunction with counterparties. This award recognizes the accomplishments of a provider, consultancy, industry organization, or internal IT group that has made great strides in helping sell-side operations maximize their collateral management operations via advances to the workflow, IT systems, and counterparty interactions.
This is one of the most prestigious honors in the FTF Awards program, recognizing a provider that has demonstrated overall excellence across the board. The winner will have distinguished itself through exceptional client service, industry leadership, innovation, and measurable impact on clients' success. This award goes beyond excellence in a single category — it celebrates a provider that has elevated the standard for what it means to serve capital markets firms.
This is one of the most prestigious honors in the FTF Awards program, recognizing a software solution that has made an outstanding impact on securities operations. The winner will have delivered clear business benefits, advanced the state of the industry, and demonstrated innovation that sets it apart from the competition. This award goes beyond excellence in a single function—it celebrates a solution that has transformed how firms operate.
This award spotlights a technology executive at a groundbreaking fintech company or a solutions provider with a history of excellence that has driven innovation in capital markets technology. The honoree may be a CTO, CIO, Chief Data Officer, Chief AI Officer, Head of Technology, Head of Engineering, or similar leader responsible for technology strategy, product development, or platform innovation. The winner will have demonstrated vision in advancing their firm's technology capabilities, delivering breakthrough solutions, or shaping the direction of the industry.
The FTF News editor, a panel of judges, and FTF News readers can nominate a provider, industry group, end-user financial services firm, user group, or individual that has embarked upon a successful financial IT project or industry initiative that has advanced operational efficiency and governance. The editor and the judges will pick the top nominees and then the ultimate winner. The group or person to be honored in this category can be selected from a variety of Ops and governance areas, including whistleblowers, operational data providers, financial services firms that achieved an exemplary implementation of an Ops system, or a new provider that disrupts the industry in a positive way.
Join FTF as we celebrate and recognize the professionals, financial technology vendors, service providers, industry bodies, and regulators who have made significant strides and noteworthy achievements in operational excellence over the 2024 calendar year.
Watch the video below to view highlights from the 2025 Awards celebration!
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