Technology teams at capital markets firms have always faced a tension between agility — empowering the business with the capabilities they need to stay competitive — and maintaining security, compliance, and stability.
Today, that tension is higher than ever: technology is evolving rapidly, particularly AI, and capital markets organizations feel they have to adopt new tools to keep up. Eighty-one percent of financial services organizations report feeling pressure to implement AI, ranging from unstructured data processing to chatbots that streamline the customer experience, to stay competitive.
At the same time, regulatory and compliance challenges are increasing with ever-tighter settlement timelines and the advent of regimes like the EU’s DORA, forcing organizations to prioritize operational resilience even as they adopt new technology. Implemented thoughtfully, technology can help firms keep up with these challenges: in a survey, 59% of firms said investments in trade flow automation played a key role in facilitating a smooth transition to T+1. The challenge for technology teams is balancing necessary technological advancement with ensuring resilience.
Fortunately, there’s a solution for technology organizations seeking to promote resilience in the capital markets operations stack while keeping up with advances in technology: data and workflow automation.
Data and workflow automation as the foundation of resilience
The main challenge technology teams face in ensuring resilience in capital markets IT infrastructure comes from fragmented and siloed systems. Ninety percent of capital markets firms use up to 20 different workflow solutions, creating countless opportunities for errors, inconsistencies, and outages.
To overcome this challenge, technology teams need data and workflow automation. Automation breaks down data silos and enables the seamless flow of data across systems. With automation, organizations can speed up trade processing, minimize costly and error-prone manual work, and ease the burden of regulatory compliance. But not all automation solutions are built for the complexity of capital markets operations.
Here are the key capabilities technology teams should look for in an automation platform:
- The platform must be able to connect to internal and external data sources, regardless of data formats or how up-to-date the source system is.
- It must be capable of standardizing, cleansing, and validating data, structured and unstructured, even from sources such as faxes and PDFs.
- It must provide capabilities for turning complex capital markets workflows into seamless automations, enabling business users to accommodate their unique client, data, and workflow needs.
- It must equip technology teams with tools for monitoring and control to enforce governance, auditability, and compliance.
Xceptor: The business-led, technology-governed data platform for capital markets
Xceptor is an enterprise-grade automation platform built for capital markets. Our platform enables technology teams to unify disparate data sources, automate multi-step workflows, and orchestrate AI, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security and compliance controls. Our approach is to empower business users, reducing reliance on IT for development — without sacrificing the necessary control or governance.
With Xceptor, capital markets firms can:
- Connect with any data source in any format, from any system: structured or unstructured, modern or legacy, even from emails.
- Extract data from the most complex, unstructured sources and leverage AI-enhanced capabilities to process and transform data for use in downstream workflows.
- Automate and orchestrate workflows with a user interface designed to let business users build processes and orchestrate people, systems, data, and AI — while ensuring IT retains control.
- Operate confidently with full visibility and control over automated processes, powered by a cloud-native, provider-agnostic architecture built for API-driven connectivity.
Xceptor is designed to empower technology teams with oversight while minimizing the day-to-day operational burden. Our low-code platform allows business users to safely modify workflows while equipping technology teams with the granular control needed to ensure stability. Xceptor’s governance layer ensures security, compliance, and process integrity to prevent uncontrolled automation sprawl. And with no fragile UI-based scripts to maintain, Xceptor minimizes the burden on support teams.
Next steps for technology leaders
Technology leaders who want to find the balance between empowering the business and maintaining stability and compliance can start by understanding their organization’s current operational resilience. Are your systems and processes sufficient for regulations such as DORA, the SEC’s Regulation SCI, and the FCA’s operational resilience rules? For example, do you have automated monitoring and alerting to identify when key systems fail? Can you automatically generate the detailed reports and audit data required by these regimes? Or are you still relying heavily on manual workflows that take up valuable team and leave room for errors?
If you’re ready to equip your organization to thrive amid shifts in both technology and regulation, get in touch to learn how Xceptor can help.