Daniel Gozman

The role of Investment Management Systems in regulatory compliance: a Post-Financial Crisis study of displacement mechanisms

The financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the resultant pressures exerted on policymakers to prevent future crises have precipitated coordinated regulatory responses globally. A key focus of the new wave of regulation is to ensure the removal of practices now deemed problematic with new controls for conducting transactions and maintaining holdings. There is increasing pressure on organizations to retire manual processes and adopt core systems, such as Investment Management Systems (IMS). These systems facilitate trading and ensure transactions are compliant by transcribing regulatory requirements into automated rules and applying them to trades. The motivation of this study is to explore the extent to which such systems may enable the alteration of previously embedded practices. We researched implementations of an IMS at eight global financial organizations and found that overall the IMS encourages responsible trading through surveillance, monitoring and the automation of regulatory rules and that such systems are likely to become further embedded within financial organizations. We found evidence that some older practices persisted. Our study suggests that the institutionalization of technology-induced compliant behaviour is still uncertain.

The role of rules-based compliance systems in the new EU regulatory landscape: perspectives of institutional change

The purpose of this paper is to understand how institutional changes to the European Union regulatory landscape may affect corresponding institutionalized operational practices within financial organizations. The study adopts an Investment Management System as its case and investigates different implementations of this system within eight financial organizations, predominantly focused on investment banking and asset management activities within capital markets. At the systems vendor site, senior systems consultants and client relationship managers were interviewed. Within the financial organizations, compliance, risk and systems experts were interviewed. The study empirically tests modes of institutional change. Displacement and Layering were found to be the most prevalent modes. However, the study highlights how the outcomes of Displacement and Drift may be similar in effect as both modes may cause compliance gaps. The research highlights how changes in regulations may create gaps in systems and processes which, in the short term, need to be plugged by manual processes. Vendors abilities to manage institutional change caused by Drift, Displacement, Layering and Conversion and their ability to efficiently and quickly translate institutional variables into structured systems has the power to ease the pain and cost of compliance as well as reducing the risk of breeches by reducing the need for interim manual systems. The study makes a contribution by applying recent theoretical concepts of institutional change to the topic of regulatory change uses this analysis to provide insight into the effects of this new environment.

The Innovation Mechanisms of Fintech Start-Ups: Insights from SWIFT’s Innotribe Competition

Abstract The emergence of financial technology around the globe is driven by efforts to deconstruct and reimagine business models embedded within financial services. Entrepreneurial endeavours to this end are diverse. Indeed, the propensity toward complexity is considerable, bridging a range of financial services, markets, innovations, industry participants, infrastructures, and technologies. This study aims to improve comprehension of the global fintech landscape. It is based on the analysis of start-ups that participated in SWIFTs Innotribe competition. We used cluster analysis to group 402 fintech start-up firms, and then selected representative cases to create a foundational understanding of the structure of the fintech landscape. The main findings of this work are: (1) the development of fintech clusters to classify core services, business infrastructures, and underlying component technologies, which characterize fintech; (2) an analysis of how fintechs synthesize different technologies to restructure flows of financial information through competitive and cooperative mechanisms of disinter-mediation, extension of access, financialization, hybridization, and personalization; (3) an analysis of related strategies for value creation connected with the competitive and cooperative mechanisms that were identified. Collectively, our results offer new insights into the diversity and range of emergent innovations and technologies that are transforming the financial services industry worldwide.

The Post-Crisis Outsourcing Relationship: Building Institutional Trust, Technology and Regulatory Controls

Following serious economic recession, government and industry attention on governance, risk and compliance has increased, causing a shift in institutional logics away from free markets towards enhanced supervision and regulation. This shift has created new regulatory institutions designed to enhance trust in transactions conducted through financial intermediaries on behalf of investors. The study explores how a major IT vendor implements an Investment Management System at eight global financial organizations over a 3 year period. The findings offer some interesting insights into the outsourcing relationship in building trust through regulatory controls for developing robust compliance practices both externally and internally. Our research finds, however, that dynamics of trust between investors, regulators and financial intermediaries may be undermined by persistent practices derived from pre-crisis institutional behaviours and logics.