Introducing the 2024 TabbFORUM NOVA awards: honoring top innovators across financial markets

The annual TabbFORUM NOVA Awards honor the financial industry’s ongoing commitment to technology-driven innovation by recognizing 40 organizations for their outstanding recent and sustained achievements. These selections from across the capital markets are the result of TabbFORUM research, with consideration given to nominations and recommendations solicited from the community. It takes into account the role of innovation not only on internal performance, but also industry impact and leadership. In addition to the 40 NOVAs, 10 more are identified as innovators to watch.

Financial markets, like the overall economy, go through cycles. The same is true of innovation and the progress it brings. But the drive to innovate, often tied to advances in technology, is as constant as any of the forces influencing economies and markets. Where technology intersects with finance and capital markets, investments are directed not just toward improving traditional processes and ways of doing business, but also toward inventing new products and ways of competing. With the NOVA Awards, TabbFORUM recognizes 40 leaders in innovation. Also named are 10 more making strides worthy of attention.

Fundamental to the selection process is the question, What is innovation? There is more to it than “we know it when we see it.” It is both art and science; it grows out of industry norms and corporate cultures, and from risk-taking and overcoming obstacles. Financial technology company FIS’s 2023 Global Innovation Report found executives to be wary of economic prospects and emerging risks. However, “even in today’s challenging economic environment,” FIS concluded, “U.S. executives still prefer to combat risk by augmenting their competitiveness through innovation.”

The TabbFORUM NOVA honorees include major exchanges (Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq and more) and financial market infrastructures (Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.); asset managers (BlackRock, Fidelity Investments) and servicers (BNY Mellon, State Street); fixed-income (MarketAxess, Tradeweb Markets and Trumid) and digital- asset platforms (EDX Markets, Paxos); and purveyors of data management (Duco, InterSystems, QUODD) and compliance and surveillance capabilities (NICE Actimize, S3).

Financial innovation was recently endorsed in a different way when Patrick McHenry, chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, introduced legislation requiring regulators to establish “financial services innovation offices.” Major federal financial agencies already have them, though few if any worldwide can match the high fintech profile of one of the NOVAs, the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Confluence

With more than 1,000 clients (including nine of the top 10 asset managers) around the world, over 900 employees and a total of 14 offices in addition to headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Confluence is a global leader in technology for investment and wealth management, investment consultants and asset owners. Over $14 trillion in assets under advisement are processed on the Confluence platform. Users can count on updates to stay on top of regulatory requirements like the European Union’s SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation) reporting, for which Confluence partnered with Manaos late last year, and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Private Fund Rule. Regarding SFDR, chief product officer Damian Handzy said that the reporting solution on the Manaos platform gives asset managers: “a streamlined service designed to reduce the time and money needed to comply with this regulation, while increasing transparency to end investors.”

Handzy, a veteran fintech and analytics technology entrepreneur, came into Confluence when it acquired Investment Metrics in 2021. Two years earlier, Confluence bought StatPro, a portfolio analytics and data provider that owned a company Handzy had previously started. He thus came full circle and personifies a tech-innovation theme within Confluence. It led to the September 2023 launch of Prism Analytics, providing asset managers “access to a range of previously unavailable market information: channel-level flows of assets and revised allocations; actual post-transaction fees by channel, investment type, and vehicle; and public and private mandates won/lost by manager,” the company said.

We’re seeing a growing demand by asset managers for greater insights and transparency on plan investments, including those without disclosure requirements, such as private plans, Prism Analytics is the most comprehensive data- driven solution on the market; it gives portfolio managers, research, sales and distribution an advantage through access to unique data, allowing them to understand whether they are playing offense or defense with a given asset class. It can help them decide whether a specific investment vehicle would appeal to their existing clients or be more attractive to newer ones.

Damian Handzy

In 2023, Confluence launched the first Large Language Model (LLM) AI application, Rex, to address the increasing complexity of reconciliations among financial and regulatory reports. Tasks that usually require heavy manual labor, such as gathering, analyzing, and ensuring consistency of regulatory reports, can be done much quicker and accurately through AI. . . Yet, it’s the use cases where there is a high level of unstructured data, currently a significant pain point when it comes to investor communications and regulatory reporting, where we’ll see the most significant opportunity for GenAI and LLMs to improve efficiency and the client experience.

President and COO Todd Moyer told Traders Magazine