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.
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. But “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
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,” Handzy commented. “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.”
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,” President and COO Todd Moyer told Traders Magazine. “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.”
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