Today’s global landscape influenced by war, pandemic, Inflation, and geopolitical changes, among other factors, is creating increasingly rapid change in markets and higher volatility, and spurring changing customer behavior and demands. The shifting dynamics of capital markets have resulted in fertile ground for innovation in financial products, customer segments, online channels and services. Meanwhile disruptive technologies create an opportunity for companies to react with speed and agility to changing customer demands.

Actual capital markets architectures are often not sufficiently prepared to align with these requirements. These are more or less influenced through historically established and grown structures of heterogeneous legacy architectures, underpinned by a variety of solutions and software providers – a set-up frequently referred to as application zoo. All this often results in reduced efficiency and higher costs, due to the need for numerous support and development teams as well as through different release cycles.

Continued margin pressure requires flexible adjustment of business and operations through innovative products, services and optimised processes. Meanwhile, increasing regulatory demands are also forcing companies to comply, while minimizing the expense and effort involved. All this is piling pressure onto companies to align their strategies accordingly within shorter time frames. Under these pressures, securing or expanding a company’s market position, customer base and revenues requires agile actions underpinned by strong internal structures.

Agile Management, flexible architectures, related structures and processes will build the basis to be ready in time for upcoming changes (act instead of react).

The digital transformation of existing architectures, systems and process environments to create a uniform systems landscape with correspondingly optimised slim processes is still ongoing. This has been influenced and will be further accelerated by current and future market and economic circumstances, including the trade disruptions and the high rate of inflation internationally. Digitalisation will trigger higher efficiency and improvements in scalability. It will support holistic and efficient digital processes and the infrastructural shifts to enable them.

Often, digitalisation has been implemented firstly within the customer-facing front office. Digital transformation of middle and back-office systems and process environments was often de-prioritised and executed in a piecemeal fashion only – “it is sufficient and working”. Dependencies on available resources, budget as well as the limited availability of easy to integrate and open architectures with corresponding solutions restricted the shift towards digitalisation.

There is huge demand for standardized, easy-to-integrate solutions and modules, with substantial depth, functionality and end-to-end support for existing system and process environments with known effort and time. To this end, the holistic architectures underpinning, that these solutions need to be easily adaptable to new demands and extended functionality at any time. Business aim is to craft a strategic master plan, related unified architectures, as well as system and process environments as necessary by current and upcoming market and customer demands.

Implementation needs to be done through a tailored plan for agile digitalisation, integration of related modules/solutions and optimisation of processes, depending on available resources, budget and given time to market. The main priorities of companies are often set as follows:

• Strategic and existing business goals remain and need to be focused Competitive, market and customer positioning to be extended with continuing high service quality, e.g.
  • New innovative products and investment offers (ESG investment products, Crypto, certificates and structured derivatives, …) with short time to market enabled through flexible, modular and scalable platforms and solutions.
  • Improve and expand online service offerings, reduce the multitude of existing applications and providers through more comprehensive platforms and related solutions – increase efficiency and economies of scale, optimise "Run-the-Bank”
  • High performance and availability – scalable and de-scalable environments on
• Aligning the complete standard architecture and solutions as well as the partial modules/functionality at any time agile with predictable costs and resources (CTB – “Change the Bank”).
• Utilising economies of scale and efficient operating models in alignment with the company’s individual strategy and preferences:
  • On premise and/or SaaS/Cloud service models
  • Reliability, high availability as well as data security

The agility and flexibility required to act on upcoming changing market and customer demands within an acceptable time to market is possible through the utilisation of standard digital integration platforms with related solutions based on innovative, scalable technologies.

All the above results in demand facing-solutions, services and system landscapes – DECIDE, of pdv Financial Software GmbH, is a software platform with related solutions/ modules covering the end-to-end capital market requirements for institutional and retail trading including related risk management.

DECIDE’s modular architecture and structure enables firms to configure bespoke solutions tailored to the individual needs of the institution, its process world, its range of products and services while also taking clients’ specific needs into consideration. The platform and modules can be implemented on customer premises (enterprise) or as a SaaS/cloud-based solution.

pdv Financial Software provides essential consulting and support for a successful implementation and integration into existing system and process environments. Firms can define their application scenarios and solution requirements for their business focus and characteristics enabling:

Introduction of innovative Financial Instruments /Products

• Create, define and implement innovative financial instruments/products (e. g. certificates, ETDs, structured derivatives, Cryptos, …) through parametrisation or adding
• Easy and seamless management of FinTech-Apps and innovations as well as real time and bidirectional communication with these Apps.

Address new market segments

• Reach out e.g. to semi-professional high volume clients with DECIDE Tradeboard as a new HTML real time trading front end featuring multi market trading screens, position keeping as well as market and address risk management
• Standardised connection of online/mobile devices, such as iPad, through pdv Web Services

Roll out of one capital market process platform with unified architecture for various business divisions

• Implementing highly automated low touch processes with little or no human Focus on and HR deployment in value-added processes such as qualitative customer advice among others.
• Provide one standard order and execution management solution (OMS/EMS) with smart order routing and algo features for listed instruments types, all order types, across asset classes to the institutional and retail brokerage as well as to wealth management connecting to relevant trading venues and routing networks.

Economic efficiency and operating models aligned to company individual strategy and preferences

Efficient operating models in line with current technology trends

• Choice of enterprise / on-premise deployment or the SaaS /Cloud services model.
• Tailor service packages to your company’s needs on demand for technical operation, or flexible definition and implementation of further services.

Manage industry and regulatory change efficiently

• Optimise “Change the Bank” budgets by implicit distribution of development cost across the customer base.
• Replacing numerous existing solutions with a standardised solution results in optimisation of related support and developments teams – optimise “Run the Bank” budgets.
• DECIDE as your standard software, enabling the active and agile implementation of new technical and regulatory standards

DECIDE will essentially assist you in raising your efficiency, the scalability of your system landscape and extended service offerings. It will enable a step-by-step transformation towards a holistic, homogenous, digital system and process environment.

The utilisation of innovative technologies, solutions and partners as well as product offerings with related services is enabling financial institutions to act and react in an agile way to changing market and customer requirements.

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