Nasdaq Recognized at Risk Awards 2021 for Best CCP Support Product of the Year
Nasdaq was awarded the Risk Awards in the category Best CCP Support Product of the Year by Risk.net. This is the third consecutive year that Nasdaq has been honored by the Risk Awards. We sat down with Anna Theorin and Louise Ramstedt, Co-Heads of CCP Products at Nasdaq Market Technology, to discuss their teams’ accomplishments during these past months, and their focus for the year ahead.
1. Nasdaq was just awarded the Risk Awards in the category Best CCP Support Product of the Year. Can you tell us more about the technology solution and how it serves the capital markets?
Anna Theorin: We provide technology to more than 20 Central Counterparty Clearinghouses (CCPs), so Nasdaq has broad experience that uniquely positions us to deliver benefits for markets worldwide. Our CCP technology solutions are specifically designed to address the risk management needs of today’s CCPs and exchanges. The solutions we have take a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to risk, leveraging multiple safeguards to empower early identification and resolution of issues before they become critical. Real-time information and good visualization continue to be in focus for us in order to facilitate efficient decision making related to risk management.
Louise Ramstedt: This award is a great recognition of the work Nasdaq is doing as a CCP technology provider. In our work, we focus heavily on performance, reliability, modularity, and scalability. By developing and running technology solutions in the cloud, we can improve scalability. Ultimately, our ambition is to facilitate efficient business decisions through reliable technology and help risk managers focus on regulatory requirements.
2. How has the offering evolved throughout the years?
AT: Performance requirements in this industry constantly evolve, meaning that we, too, need to continuously tweak the technology to cope with the higher volumes and new requirements for decreased time for margin runs. Additionally, we always look at how we can simplify the workflow for clients and how we can offer more services that ultimately help the clients in their risk management processes.
LR: Through time, we have become more flexible. Through recent updates, the product now includes flexible cross-asset offset allowing for better collateralization optimization, independent of whether all assets are cleared within one or multiple clearinghouses.
3. How do you work in your teams to keep up with evolving industry trends and market requirements?
AT: Everything we do, we do with our customers in mind. Analyzing their challenges and their evolving requirements is a key part of our line of work. While volumes keep increasing across markets and regulatory requirements evolve, so do the clients’ requirements, making it even more important to have flexible technology solutions that allow the CCPs to handle these changes seamlessly. Having an architecture that supports shorter time to market and larger architectural changes enable efficiencies. Most importantly, we focus on keeping an open dialogue with the customers to understand how their customers and their business models can be best supported by Nasdaq’s full product portfolio.
LR: I can echo that. We work closely with our customers as the open dialogue is of utmost importance. Collaborating and co-developing with customers help us stay ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation and adapting to changing requirements. Process wise, it is equally as important to have a process that allows for seamless testing, reviews and dialogues. Therefore, I would say that creating an environment and processes where the teams can test, review and collaborate together with the customers is key.
4. Looking ahead, what will you focus on this upcoming year? What are some of the recent industry trends or technology developments that you take into consideration in your work?
AP: In terms of technology, the cloud remains a focus for the year to come. There is a growing interest in cloud transformation to become more resilient and efficient. Furthermore, many see a move to the cloud as an opportunity for their organization to focus on developing the core CCP business rather than spending resources on maintaining and scaling hardware and infrastructure. For the foreseeable future, cloud transformation will continue to redefine operations and enable organizations to become more flexible and agile while improving client services, for example, by serving clients with test environments to run portfolio what-if scenarios on-demand, using live data.
LR: We have a great team that works together to solve challenges for the industry. We want to focus on becoming even more proactive in driving the industry standards. In addition to everything we see happening in the cloud area, the role of APIs to support well-functioning ecosystems is equally as important. Nasdaq is standardizing the use of APIs, both internally, for communication between business modules within Nasdaq’s full product portfolio, as well as externally, for efficient communication with trading venues, clearing members, CSDs and banks. This award is a great reminder that our work is recognized by our industry peers, and it’ll be another encouragement for our teams this upcoming year.
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