My first end-of-year note to our community is a nice excuse to pause and look back at what a year it’s been for CloudMargin and the industry as a whole.
For CloudMargin, 2019 has been a truly transformative year. We’ve more than doubled our community, maintained an average of five releases per day, signed a historic partnership deal with AcadiaSoft, and started relationships with some of the most forward-thinking institutions with more coming on board as additional partners and clients in the coming months. The team is taking new shape with new people coming on board (one of those being myself!) and CloudMargin veterans stepping into new roles. And we continue to get recognised and awarded by industry associations.
All in all, CloudMargin is continuing to do what it set out to do from the start – change the industry for the better – which is exactly why I joined in June. I couldn’t be any more excited to keep pushing for that worthy cause.
Taking an industry view, 2019 seemed to be the year that we all got inundated with UMR. I, for one, have become pretty bored of the topic. That isn’t to underestimate its impact on the industry – I know, it’s huge. But as we always do, it will happen, and clients will ultimately get ready. We just have a tendency to kick the can down the road until we run out of road. There are loads of great resources out there (including ours and some from CloudMargin partners) that can help you think and prepare for the remaining phases.
That being said, I think it’s time for all industry players – market participants and the ecosystem that supports them – to start advancing the conversation to how firms can use this regulatory headwind as an opportunity to truly transform business models and adopt technology that future-proofs operations. The world is moving more and more quickly, and the adoption of cloud-based technologies is only increasing. Our very own Karl Wyborn discusses this quite nicely in a recent video for Jonathan Lothian News at FIA EXPO.
A new decade, a new focus
2020 should be the year when we move past UMR and reflect on how we can take this archaic piece of post-trade process and drag it kicking and screaming into the third decade of the 20th century. It should be about powering the industry to a place where we don’t have fragmented systems talking ancient Greek to each other. It should be the continued migration to modern technology that allows us all to remove the inefficiencies from our lives. It should be about showing our management teams that we are forward-looking enough to realise we can transform and make our organisations ready for the constant evolution we now operate in. It should be about cost reduction through automation and redeploying our resources to value-added activities.
With all this year’s achievements, I do have a few shout outs:
- To IHS Markit – A big THANK YOU for continuing to support us across the business in indispensable ways.
- To AcadiaSoft, specifically to Chris Walsh and his outstanding team – A huge WELCOME and thanks for being awesome partners so far.
- To our clients – You have been amazing partners who have driven us to make the platform a game-changing product that has enabled the largest to the smallest of firms accomplish what you couldn’t before. These are your words, not mine!
- And to the entire CloudMargin team – You have simply made it all possible and I’m honoured to work with you every day to move the industry forward.
2020 will be a very exciting year for us. We have huge plans. We will power this industry for the years to come. And we will enable the transformation that will take us all to the place where we can confidently say we have solved some age-old problems.
Thank you and happy new year!