• Mark Taylor believes there has been a growing interest about regulations in the last 12 months such as MiFID II
• One of the other areas that he believes has been gaining a lot of interest in is intraday liquidity management
• He also stated that organisations are looking at cost-effective models for deployments

Mark Taylor: Sure! This has been very exciting in SIBOS. First, it’s great to be here. Also super excited to get down to Asia next year for Sydney, that’s my area, so I run the region for SmartStream. We found that in the last 12 months, a lot of interest has been about regulations. One of the key ones that we found, even though it’s European base, is MiFID II. So a lot of the organisations that we do, where I do, were also in Asia Pacific, are actually impacted by this. So one of the areas is around reference data… Also regulatory reconciliations that we brought out as a package to actually achieve those regulatory goals especially MiFID II. One of the other areas that we’ve been seeing a lot of interest in and we’ve been developed in is intraday liquidity management. So are cash liquidity management, meeting Basel III requirements. So, if you look at the HKMA, they are one of the stronger ones within the region, so even clients within the region, globally are looking to address those in Asia Pacific.

So our roadmap. Obviously each country has different requirements, so we’re very specific around how we address that. There are still common themes. Again, if you look at collateral management with the IOSCO regulations that are coming out that have affected clients from Japan all the way down to Australia and people within between, with the introduction of the initial margin requirements. Also, what we are seeing is that organisations are looking at cost-effective models for deployments. So, a lot of organisations are looking to reduce their cost and, hence, looking at vendors or companies like us to move, to manage services. So, one of the things we’ve seen is quite an optic and increase interest in providing software-as-a-service and then manage services layers on that, rather than just the traditional software deployment.

I think, it’s been very interesting because you know, it’s payments, payments, payments. It’s been very payments focus but then the alternative strategies around that as we know of every organisation that has been close to this. But you know, if you’re looking at Australia with their NPP, the new payment’s platform, we’ve been working very closely with a number of organisations around the exception management and overlay services even from a custody point of view. So, that’s been very interesting to me this week, I’ve seen a lot of interest there. And again I think if you’re looking in Japan and also in Hong Kong area, there’s been an increased, increased interest in cash and liquidity management area. People are looking at the funding cost, not only from a bank’s perspective but also potentially offering the overlay services to the corporate and individual clients.