Few would disagree that 2016 was a year full of challenges on many fronts, including middle-office and buy-side operations.
For Mal Cullen, CEO of Eagle Investment Systems, the top middle office challenges last year were a low interest rate environment, fee compression for financial services firms, a major shift from active to passive management of portfolios and political turmoil.
“For me, what really rose to the top in 2016 was organizations’ needs to digitize and transform their business,” Cullen says. “I think that to me became the number one challenge that business organizations are looking to solve.”
Eagle’s responses to those challenges last year most likely contributed to the two awards it won — Best Middle Office Solution and Best Buy-Side Operations Solutions — via the 2017 FTF News Technology Innovation Awards. The winners of the annual FTF Awards competition are chosen by qualified voters who are industry participants.
Yet last year provided Eagle and Cullen with some key surprises, he says.
“What was surprising for me last year was that we saw a trend around outsourcing where organizations wanted to maintain some level of oversight and control around the outsourcing service provider,” Cullen says. “So, in our world, we look at that as more of a co-sourcing arrangement where even when an outsourcing opportunity came up people still had teams they wanted to leave behind to provide some level of responsibility and oversight around what they’re asking the service provider to take on. I think part of that is around not really willing to give up the risk that they have for their own clients.”
This co-sourcing dynamic drove Eagle to make renewed investments in “our technology platform both within our Eagle product suite as well as within BNY Mellon to provide tools to give organizations both the instrumentation and transparency around what was going on in the outsourcing world,” Cullen says.
The investments also targeted the resolution of everyday client issues by building a user interface (UI) that would alleviate the need for “getting on the phone, trading voicemails [and] passing spreadsheets back and forth,” Cullen says.
The UI provides a collaborative customer experience “that would enable a partnership opportunity to solve problems,” Cullen says. “We’re seeing that both in fund accounting and the middle office and we’ve been investing in technology platforms to provide workflow and tools in order to do that. We see that as a trend that will continue.”
FTF News interviewed Cullen during the FTF Awards gala celebration June 20 at the Dream Downtown Hotel in New York City.
CREDITS:
Video Production: Janene Knox and William J. Poznanski, Jr.
Interview conducted by: Eugene Grygo, chief content officer, FTF News
Co-Producers: Sarah Hathaway, vice president, Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) and Eugene Grygo
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