Though the scale and scope of their capital markets and wholesale businesses vary substantially, all firms in these sectors are faced with fundamental challenges on three fronts:

• The increasing purchasing power and sophistication of their corporate and institutional clients who have access to alternative electronic trading platforms, direct access to some markets and who continue squeeze margins and raise the bar of services quality;
• The requirements imposed by regulators whether under Basel II and MiFID;
• The continuing pressures on investment budgets at a time when they are facing huge pressures to invest to renew very old technology platforms to keep up with the ever increasing demands from regulators and clients.

Faced with these pressures, the larger firms have little choice but to make a commitment to fundamental transformation of their operations and to carve out the budget necessary to reinvent themselves. They are pursuing process automation, implementing workflow technologies and understanding and integrating the underlying data structures required to implement EAI software. Other firms have decided to outsource the post-trade functions often to onshore transaction-based service firms who are willing to sell their excess capacity at their marginal cost.

Effective, cross-enterprise control is also high on the agenda of firms in these sectors. Regulatory pressures are important drivers but so is the increasing risk profile of many sell-side firms. Customer-focused agency traders have increasingly become proprietary traders in an effort to make money and survive.

Credit Eterna helps clients in the capital markets and wholesale banking sectors with these challenges as a consultant and managed services provider. Credit Eterna offers solutions in areas such as operational transformation (trade cycle STP, enterprise integration, sourcing and outsourcing models, shared services, process improvement, etc.), data management (data cleansing, data migration, index data, etc.), enterprise control and compliance (operational risk, Basle II, MiFID), and outsourced business process management (managed reference data, internal reconciliations, etc.).