Capco, a provider of consulting and managed services to the financial services industry, has expanded its North American Capital Markets Group. The expansion is in response to significant service demand from investment banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, and clearing firms as they seek to reduce costs, shift to fee-based revenue models, mitigate trading risks, and achieve long-term, sustainable growth.
The Capital Markets Group is part of Capco’s recently announced North America growth strategy to serve the needs of a broader range of clients. The group’s focus covers front, middle and back office activities across the complex trading environment which includes derivatives, fixed income, currencies, commodities, equities, futures, structured products, and credit default swap products. The group also provides clients with consulting services and solutions in post merger integration, target operating model design and implementation, technology rationalization/replatforming and trading process/controls reviews.
Joe Anastasio, partner at Capco, said: “In today’s post-subprime crisis era, trading firms are re-evaluating their business strategies, cost structures and internal controls, and looking for more balanced business models. During the boom market days, profits and gains were achievable based on huge risk bets that camouflaged inefficiencies in a firm’s infrastructure and cost models. Now, with more pressure on trading margins, we’re seeing a surge in demand to help companies identify new ways to cut costs, generate fee-based revenues and drive long-term, sustainable growth.”
Michael Haworth, partner at Capco, said: “After the Stanford and Madoff scandals, process integrity has become Wall Street’s new watch word. Increased regulatory scrutiny is transforming the financial markets and having a profound impact on firms’ internal controls. Our clients want to achieve full transparency in their businesses and, therefore, need to address technology integration issues to ensure that their operational controls are robust. Additionally, they need to optimize their data management and governance to provide immediate access to data that meets required regulatory and compliance demands.”
