“Together, we have a tremendous market opportunity to help our clients drive results while continuing to deliver top-quartile total shareholder returns.”
Margin compression, the drive for cost reduction and increasing regulatory pressures have forced banks to seek ways to reduce trade execution expenses and gain transparency. Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (Broadridge), incorporated on December 6, 2006, is a provider of investor communications and technology-driven solutions to banks, broker-dealers, mutual funds and corporate issuers. The company’s segments include Investor Communication Solutions, and Global Technology and Operations. The company’s services include investor and customer communications, securities processing, and data and analytics solutions. The company delivers a range of solutions that helps its clients serve their retail and institutional customers across the entire investment lifecycle, including pre-trade, trade, and post-trade processing functionality. The company serves a client base across four client groups: capital markets, asset management, wealth management and corporations.
Broadridge began as the brokerage services division of ADP in 1962. Since becoming independent in 2007, they have grown into a global Fintech company with over $4 billion in revenues and are recognized as an invaluable partner for the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. They help drive business transformation for their clients with solutions for enriching client engagement, navigating risk, optimizing efficiency and generating revenue growth. Broadridge handles millions of trades a day involving trillions of dollars, support communications that reach 75 percent of North American households and manage shareholder voting in 90 countries.
Adopting Technological Innovation: Blockchain
According to the Ex-CEO of Broadridge, Rich Daly who is also a Forbes contributor, blockchain is so much more; it’s incredibly innovative and its promise is far-reaching. This technology is a secure and transparent way to digitally track the ownership of assets before, during and after transactions, and it has the potential to ultimately transform everything from how stock exchanges operate all the way to how proxies are voted. From Wall Street to Estonia, financial firms are investing in and testing blockchain to put it to the test.
Broadridge’s strategy is to invest organically, as well as through leading innovators in this space. Last year, Broadridge made a minority investment in Digital Asset Holdings, a start-up led by former J.P. Morgan executive Blythe Masters, which is working to use distributed ledger technology to settle short-term lending arrangements between dealers known as repos, among other things. They also joined the Hyperledger Project, an open-source project advancing common blockchain standards. According to Rich Broadridge is not the only one exploring this technology. Aite Group forecasts that capital markets firms will spend about $400 million annually by 2019 developing blockchain-enabled solutions, up from just $75 million last year. Blockchain will have a short-, medium- and longer-term impact on the financial services industry.
In the short-term, distributed ledger technology can process sophisticated transactions with complex structures — high-value trades with low volumes – such as syndicated loans, which take over 20 days to settle in a highly manual process. Blockchain has the potential to speed processing, cut legal costs, and reduce closing fees for these types of instruments. Such improvements would add liquidity to loan markets. Blockchain could also improve efficiency and liquidity for over-the-counter derivative trades such as credit-default swaps and private stock transactions. In these markets, blockchain can make a significant impact within 3-5 years.
Rich was succeeded by Tim Gokey, present CEO, who joined Broadridge in 2010 to lead the Company’s growth initiatives. He was named Chief Operating Officer in 2012 and President in August 2017. In those roles, he led the sustained development of the Governance, Capital Markets, and Wealth Management businesses. He was also responsible for the expansion of Broadridge’s capabilities through organic investments and tuck-in acquisitions that have positioned Broadridge as a global Fintech leader. Prior to joining Broadridge, Gokey was President of the Retail Tax business at H&R Block, where he had a strong record of innovation and profitable growth. Previously, he spent 13 years at McKinsey and Company, where he led McKinsey’s North American Financial Services Sales and Marketing Practice and served as a trusted advisor to the senior management teams at leading clients in the financial services industry. Mr. Gokey serves on the Board of C.H. Robinson, a leading third-party logistics provider. A Rhodes Scholar, Mr. Gokey holds a doctorate in Finance from Oxford University as well as a joint Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and Public Affairs from Princeton University.
“I am both humbled and excited to lead Broadridge on its next stage of growth,” adds Gokey. “Broadridge’s more than 10,000 associates deliver exceptional client outcomes every day. Together, we have a tremendous market opportunity to help our clients drive results while continuing to deliver top-quartile total shareholder returns through disciplined capital allocation and a long-term focus. We will build on our position as a Fintech and innovation leader by continuing to invest for the long term in our technology platforms, broaden our product set and deliver network value to our clients.” He continues, “I am also honored to be succeeding Rich Daly and delighted that he will remain at Broadridge as Executive Chairman. In his new role, Rich will lead the Board and support several important regulatory initiatives for which he has enormous passion, including digital and retail investor engagement.”
Since becoming a public company in 2007, Broadridge has significantly enhanced its solution set, technology platforms, and global reach. Over that time, Broadridge has grown from 4,000 to more than 10,000 associates and its revenues have more than doubled to $4.3 billion. That growth has been rewarded by investors. It’s market capitalization has increased from $2.7 billion to $15.9 billion, generating annualized total shareholder returns of 21%. The Company was added to the S&P 500 in June 2018.
Managed Support Services
Broadridge offers advanced real-time transaction processing services that automate securities transaction lifecycles, from desktop productivity tools, data aggregation, performance reporting and portfolio management, to order capture and execution, trade confirmation, margin, cash management, asset servicing, clearance and settlement, reference data, reconciliations, accounting, compliance, and regulatory reporting. Hosted in state‑of‑the‑art data centres and on the cloud, Broadridge’s services process clearance and settlement in more than 80 countries. Its multi‑asset, multi‑market, multi-currency and multi‑entity applications support real‑time global trade processing of equity, fixed income, mutual funds, foreign exchange and exchange-traded derivatives in established and emerging markets. Its services offer high degrees of scaling, redundancy, reliability and flexibility, as well as 99.9% availability.
Broadridge’s data protection is aligned with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework and the company is ISO-27001 certified. Broadridge processes nearly $6 trillion in equity and fixed‑income trades daily in North America, as well as processing equity trades for seven of the 10 largest global investment banks, including billions of US institutional trades each year. The company provides fixed-income and repo processing for 18 of the 23 primary dealers, representing more than 60% of the daily trade volume. It has 45 clients on its operations-managed services, including seven primary dealers that collectively account for more than 25 million customer accounts and an average of 2.9 million trades per day.
Broadridge’s managed services are highly customizable and help clients adapt to new regulations while mutualizing operations and innovation costs, and increasing operational efficiency, governance and risk mitigation. Broadridge has a strategic collaboration with Accenture and its global business process outsourcing capabilities to provide services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Broadridge collaborates with clients to apply new technologies in innovative ways. Recent examples include an artificial intelligence application to identify trade allocation requests in unstructured data, and a pilot using distributed ledger technology to streamline and automate end-to-end processes for bilateral repo agreements and confirmations. Michael Alexander, president of Broadridge Wealth and Capital Markets Solutions, says “Broadridge is a global fintech leader with $4 billion in revenue that provides communications, technology, data and analytics. This Risk Technology award is in recognition of the deep industry expertise, operational process excellence, leading technology and innovation, and proven governance that we offer with our managed services and through which our clients are able to realize unlimited business potential. Our clients benefit from being part of a network that leverages shared investment and scale and mutualizes costs to drive return on investment. We help transform businesses so they are ready for what is next.”
Looking Ahead
Broadridge also recently acquired Shadow Financial Systems, Inc., a provider of multi-asset class post-trade solutions for the capital markets industry. The acquisition builds upon Broadridge’s current industry-leading post-trade processing capabilities by adding a market-ready solution for exchanges, interdealer brokers and proprietary trading firms. In addition, the acquisition adds capabilities across exchange-traded derivatives (ETDs) and cryptocurrency.
“The acquisition of Shadow Financial Systems is the latest example of Broadridge building upon our industry-leading capital markets solutions,” states Michael Alexander, co-head of North American Wealth and Capital Markets Solutions for Broadridge. “We look forward to bringing real benefits to a new set of market participants as well as new capabilities to our existing client base.”
“We are excited to join industry leader Broadridge and to better serve our clients’ evolving needs while adding the scale, deep domain expertise and technology resources that Broadridge can provide,” adds Don Marino, President of Shadow Financial Systems, Inc.
Alantra acted as an exclusive financial and strategic advisor to Shadow Financial Systems, Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sources: https://www.broadridge.com/
