HQLAx
You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone in the collateral management space that doesn’t have good things to say about HQLAx and its founder Guido Stroemer.
No stranger to Global Custodian’s Leaders in Custody awards, Stroemer has been an Industry Person of the Year nominee in the past, while also being included in our 30 People to Shape the Industry of the Future list. Since we first heard about HQLAx around five years ago, the initiative has gone from strength to strength and this year earnt the backing of JP Morgan which added to counterparts BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Citigroup, and Deutsche Börse Group as investors in the collateral mobility platform.
The bank had already connected to HQLAx as a tri-party agent, but now also connects its agency securities lending business.
“Our vision is to accelerate the financial ecosystem’s transition towards frictionless ownership transfers of assets, and our immediate mission statement is to help improve collateral mobility amongst market leading triparty agents and custodians in Europe,” said Stroemer.
“The key to moving our vision forward is market adoption, and the best way for us to achieve market adoption is to create a network effect for collateral mobility by connecting our platform to the most relevant pools of collateral in the securities finance industry.
“By the end of this year, six of the industry’s pre-eminent tri-party agents and custodians will be connected to our platform.”
Proxymity
Rarely have we seen a FinTech start-up achieve scale and results so quickly. The digital proxy voting platform launched out of Citi’s innovation lab network and D10XSM programme is one of the big FinTech success stories of the securities services industry over the past year.
Proxymity has more than quadrupled its numbers in staff and onboarded some of its biggest backers. The FinTech transitioned Citi’s and Deutsche Bank’s business onto the platform, before JP Morgan became the third custodian to connect to Proxymity in October, initially in France and Belgium, with plans to go live in Australia and New Zealand ahead of 2022 proxy season.
Since then, announcements have come thick and fast, with HSBC and BME joining the platform and news of a Series B funding totalling $31 million.
After realising that Proxymity solved a multi-million-dollar problem in the industry at a time when regulations around shareholders rights were coming into force, the FinTech has been growing at an impressive pace and looks set to continue capturing the business of the largest custodians.
Saphyre
When Global Custodian spoke with Saphyre’s co-founders last year, we couldn’t help but catch the excitement from their contagious energy and clear vision. Twins Gabino Roche Jr and Stephen Roche boast decades of experience across financial services and IT and together came up with Saphyre – which has taken the industry by storm.
The FinTech enables buy-side firms to communicate with custodians, prime brokers and third-party administrators by eliminating emails, fax and phone calls, and provides real-time capabilities that displays the status and next steps of client onboarding.
The start-up claims it allows firms not only to assess risk faster and clearly, but also speed up their onboarding processes and eliminate 70%-75% of redundant or inefficient post-trade activities.
In June, BNY Mellon announced it would be working with the New Jersey-based start-up to utilise artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automate and expedite client onboarding.
The agreement followed a deal with JP Morgan and BlackRock in 2020, while the past 12 months also saw a deal signed with fellow burgeoning FinTech Symphony.
Taskize
When Taskize chief executive officer John O’Hara stepped down from the role after a decade in charge, the plaudits for the departing CEO and the business rolled in.
O’Hara had steered Taskize – the provider of operations workflow between counterparties – from start-up status to serving a community of over 350 financial firms in 53 countries, comprising buy-side, sell-side and infrastructure providers including Euroclear, LCH and DTCC.
Taskize was left in good hands though, as Philip Slavin, chief operating officer and co-founder stepped into the role. Slavin – known to many in the industry through Taskize’s success – took over in November and since then secured a partnership with Citi so the bank’s custody clients can leverage the FinTech’s query management platform to directly connect to their Citi Operations counterparts.
The collaboration represented a milestone in Taskize’s journey under its new chief executive, and a major client win in the world’s largest sub custodian.
Taskize’s user interface will offer Citi’s custody clients with a direct means to contact their operational counterparts, replacing the traditional email mechanism, and provides real-time visibility on current query status and full audit trail capabilities. By creating an end-to-end operational workflow experience with counterparties, Citi custody clients can benefit from an accelerated and enhanced counterparty resolution experience.