The start of the 2020s is proving to be as demanding for capital markets institutions as the decade following the Global Financial Crisis.

A new capital markets structure had begun to emerge over the last decade, but with the unprecedented global situation, this has now compounded both the opportunities and challenges for financial institutions.

Balancing regulatory compliance, enhancing financial performance, and improving business and technology capabilities remain pressing priorities as your firm adopts greater agility and resilience to operate effectively in these changing market conditions and the evolving ecosystem.

Working collaboratively with you, we're architecting the future of capital markets.

The challenge and opportunities

As your firm embarks on a journey through macro-economic recovery back to more stable operations, you have an opportunity to accelerate restoring financial strength of your firm by restructuring early and adapting your operating model.

Your firm should focus on today and plan for tomorrow, considering the following key challenges and opportunities:

Regulatory agenda

Authorities have pushed back deadlines for some major regulatory initiatives, giving you the chance to re-prioritise programmes. This means focusing on the most essential initiatives, such as LIBOR reform, whilst optimizing solutions for the most complex regulatory changes, such as Basel III.

Agile and resilient operating models

Adopt greater agility and better resilience to flex and meet changing service-delivery requirements. This will enable greater focus and clarity around true product cost, and enable rapid scale up and shut down as product innovation drives demand and the evolution of the offer.

Redistribution and new locations of the future workforce

Look at a distributed workforce model and greater rotation in workspaces: increased working from home, reducing large concentrations of real estate, adopting more collaborative technologies, and enabling better ways of working.

Cost-reduction and restructuring

In-flight cost reduction and restructuring initiatives will need to be re-planned. Greater creativity is needed to release capital, potentially leveraging balance sheets of large technology providers or generating revenue by commercialising technology assets to offer industry utilities.

Increasing fintech adoption and innovation

A catalyst for you to kick-start a transformation to simplify operations and technology. The adoption of fintech and regtech solutions are to be embraced as these innovations increase operational and technology resilience and agility.

Rebuilding and optimising the supply chain

Rethink how best to optimise or collaborate with your new third-party suppliers, fintechs and ecosystem platforms, to perform services with greater business continuity over a more flexible, disaggregated value chain that provides agility, stability, and innovation.

Understanding and responding to M&A activity

Global and scale wholesale banks may start to look for discounted players in the market to acquire, and small-to-medium players will look to consolidate in an overcrowded market to shore up balance sheets and weather the storm.

New capital markets ecosystem

Financial market infrastructure has proven resilient in these challenging financial and operational conditions, but there is a compelling need to align the revenue and cost base. We anticipate this will see a greater shift towards specialised service providers, allow economies of scale to be captured, and innovation harnessed while reducing the cost to serve clients.

Reset and purpose of capital markets

Firms can individually and collectively innovate capital markets operations, reset their culture and reputation and renew their purpose: by focusing on the customer franchise, understand adaptive behaviours and evolving needs of customers across segments, who have been at the heart of this human crisis.

Harps Sidhu
Partner, Head of Capital Markets
Harps Sidhu

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How we can work with you

Our capital markets team bring diverse experience, new skills and capabilities that help will help you build competitive advantage for your firm.

Changes in regulation are creating difficulties and opportunities. We work closely with the regulator to help shape the sector and ensure you are at the forefront of key regulatory developments.

Local scale and global reach

We offer an expert model of services with deep financial services expertise to meet specific challenges but with the scale and breadth of a global network. We work with over 70 specialists across the global financial services group with experts based in Switzerland, USA, and India, to name a few.

Ecosystem and alliances

In today’s challenging and complex market, we collaborate with other leading firms to bring innovative and bespoke solutions to you. Working closely with our alliance of fintech, regtech, technology, legal and IT outsourcing firms to combine our skills and capabilities to meet the challenges that you will face.

In 2020, we forged an innovative and strategic collaboration with unique global alternative legal and compliance services provider, Konexo, a division of Eversheds Sutherland, and DXC Technology to provide an integrated solution to the Interbank Offered Rates (IBOR) transition.

Using our services to help you build a capital markets firm of the future

Our key services

We provide a full capability practice with strong track record in business risk services and regulatory expertise, serving market participant, market structure operators and regulators.

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