Doug Christensen is VP of Strategy at Tier1 Financial Solutions.

What were the key themes for your business in 2019?

Primarily, we’ve been evolving our technology to form the interconnected desktop of the future for banking and markets. At Tier1, we continue to drive innovation through our best in class products such as our core capital markets platform, powered by industry leader Salesforce, which is secure, interoperable and highly adaptive to support a broad array of needs our clients require.

That platform is Tier1’s comprehensive client relationship management (CRM) system. With the right partners, tools, and plugin capabilities, we’ve been able to create an all-encompassing dealer-wide CRM with the security and encryption to support capital markets and investment banking professionals. While our clients have similar needs, we have the ability to accommodate nuances that are more bespoke to help connect the CRM to a firm’s broader client tools including a trade blotter, risk management systems, onboarding tools, pricing engines, order management system (OMS) platforms and a host of other tools needed to manage their end clients with a holistic solution. Integrated and standardized solutions are increasingly important.

What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
While they may not be coming out of left field, flexibility and collaboration will be two key themes that will dominate the technology landscape in 2020, as well as the relationships that comprise it. Buy-side firms have stated that flexibility is the most important factor when examining which technology partners fit their operating model. With open, secure cloud-based architectures becoming more of a dominant choice and large, monolithic systems starting to diminish across all desks, flexibility of technology providers and their ability to collaborate with clients and their fintech counterparts will drive the structural developments in the New Year.

What are your customer’s pain points and how have they changed from a year ago?
While workflow efficiency and the ability to streamline communication across the organization will be a defining factor in 2020, firms will be putting greater emphasis on accelerating the build of their digital transformation strategies. Over the last decade, 8-10 months has been the customary implementation period to fully deploy a solution suite across an organization. Now, firms want more out-of-the-box solutions, particularly in the mid-market, minimizing that deployment period to as little as two months. The pace of the industry is only getting faster and firms want to mirror that with the speed at which they roll-out their technology stack and move to a model of continuous innovation in order to remain competitive.