Marc Murphy is CEO, Cengiz Kiamil is Head of Product Strategy, and Niall Twomey is CTO at Fenergo.

What key themes can we expect to see in 2022?

Change will be afoot across the financial industry in the New Year with some of the UK’s biggest banks, including Nationwide and Barclays, appointing new CEOs. With new leadership comes expectation of change and with that, the new executives will likely want to modernise from the top down. In addition to this, digital transformation is likely to play a significant role in 2022 as banks gear up to comply with ESG and other regulations while striving to win in customer experience and to reduce costs.

What are your expectations for 2022?

The regulatory landscape for financial institutions has never been more complex. The velocity of change is increasing and the lines between regulations such as financial crime,  ESG, reputation risk and fraud etc, are being blurred. Operational efficiency and a focus on automating compliance will be front of mind for banks in 2022. Banks won’t keep clients if they continue to take a long time to provision services. For too long now, employees have had to manually re-enter the same client information into disparate and numerous IT systems which do not talk to each other. When it comes to data, third party is the way forward but the key to success will be how we define verification standards.

Whilst still satisfying regulators, banks will get serious about finally replacing legacy tech with API-connected technology ecosystems which streamline data and policy management to ultimately improve time to revenue and client experience. These will be the banks that perform best in 2022.

How can asset managers face ever-growing technology challenges in 2022?

Schroders’ acquisition of Rivers and Mercantile’s fiduciary management business is just the latest in a long line of M&A deals across the sector this year. Moving into 2022, it will be interesting to see whether asset managers can remove longstanding technology headaches post some of these high-profile acquisitions. One of the biggest challenges around in the wake of any acquisitions deal is data management. Even the more established firms have their data held across siloed systems – which presents a clear risk from a regulatory perspective. Having client, fund and counterparty information held across different parts of the business not only creates a significant compliance headache, but it also means the end investor is not receiving the best experience. For any asset manager looking to on-board newly acquired funds, a centralised data strategy leveraging cloud technology is essential to pull all the information together and consistently maintain it.