If the back offices of developed markets have shown it difficult to get their houses in order, what does it say to the emerging markets?Everybody needs to get their house in order. The financial crisis highlighted that a lot of the issues came from insufficient investments in back office processes. That is true in every market, any size, any institution buy side or sell side. There has been a ratio of investment in the front office and the back office that is going the wrong way. The ratio point is now 1.5 people in the back office to 1 in the front office, whereas it used to be 0.5 to 1 person ratio. So the back office has become overloaded in head count as rather than automate they simply added head count to manage rising volumes. You cannot run your back office off Excel spreadsheets. Even if you are a small bank in an emerging market, trading with the outside world, people want to have (a) high level of connectivity and efficiency.
How open are emerging markets to the SWIFT network?There are countries who have said it makes no sense to pay the SWIFT passport for internal transactions and payments. We are agnostic whether this is a good idea or not. Our solutions are built to take in feeds and data from multiple sources and formats.
What are the problems facing corporate actions in emerging markets?Corporate actions market in general is at a very, very poor level of automation. In emerging markets it is very hard to collect the data the DTCC, ITC, Bloomberg and Reuters have a tough time creating consistent, clean sources of data. It leaves work for custodians to become the data collectors. The larger banks now have much better data than the data vendors themselves.