Adapt or else? How the sell-side is adjusting to new risks

Bloomberg

03-06-2025

Among examples, Allright says, are market risk and credit risk capital requirements under the Basel framework. The proposal by the Basel Committee to strengthen banks' resilience to risks was written in 2019, but its introduction has been pushed back repeatedly since then. Banks are unsure when, or even if, they should invest in complying with the rule.
There is also a trade-off to be considered – which other compliance project must be deprioritized to provide financial headroom for any new rules? 'Uncertainty of when, or if, a regulation is required adds a risk to a bank, who have to make a decision on how to invest engineering resources to meet regulations,' says Allright.
Technology risks
Technology itself is adding risks to banking operations. As Bloomberg's Global Head of Sell-Side Product Phil McCabe explained earlier in this report, the advent of electronic trading and automation has compressed investors' fees, hastening the diversification of their portfolios into new markets as they search of better returns. This has brought liquidity to once niche asset classes such as crypto, private equity and structured products
Moving into new markets requires investment to develop new complex pricing models and deploy techniques to clean and smooth data. These costs can increase further when there is a requirement to provide portfolio level analytics in a timely manner.
Search for innovative solutions
Focusing on data and its increasing significance in banking operations: consistent datasets, particularly when used for pricing financial securities, provide banks with reliable informational bases for assessing and addressing emerging risks. Additionally, APIs facilitate connectivity to software and modeling tools, enabling banks to effectively utilise the expanding data pools accumulated by the sell-side on a daily basis.
However, as the sophistication of data uses grows, many banks are unlikely to have necessary capabilities in-house to smooth curves and clean data sources as well as accumulate all data sets in a timely fashion, and so they increasingly need to turn to data- and technology-specialist vendors.
Mitigation technology
Sell-side organizations must consider how to achieve technological transformation to address new risk profiles. Building capacity is one option, but it is costly and requires ongoing updates. This strategy may be impractical if the organization's tech stack is fragmented, and systems are poorly connected.
As the speed of technological change and the cost of implementation rise, it has become prudent for banks to outsource these operations.
A key to meeting the challenges of the new regulatory landscape is access to consistent data sets and pricing models, says Allright. 'What you [as a bank] don't want to have is a risk solution at the top of the house that's different from a solution that the traders are utilizing, because it's likely they will be looking at different numbers,' he says.
In organisations with siloed tech stacks, end users such as traders and compliance professionals, may not be working from single source of truth dataset, or a golden source of their enterprise intelligence. This becomes challenging when different departments may have to report to different regulators with different data sets.
Having access to consistent data and pricing models ensures banks can satisfy modern reporting rules because regulators require data transparency and accurate pricing models that can justify the claims and assumptions built into disclosures.
An additional reason to seek external support is the ability to connect to data and models in structures such as clouds and APIs, which allows for secure integration of external and internal data and provides organizations with a comprehensive view of their risk exposures.
It is of great importance to banks to bring huge volumes of quality data into their systems ready for analysis and querying, says Allright.
To that end, Bloomberg has developed tools and technology that allows -banks to access software and infrastructure through the cloud and APIs without the need to for large capital outlays. For instance, Bloomberg's Web Services technology delivers lightweight, industry-standard APIs.
These APIs provide banks with flexible access to Bloomberg's software and infrastructure without requiring significant capital investment. 'A lot of investment in the past has gone into hardware on site, but these are machines that are not as flexible and scalable as we move into a new cloud-based computing world,' Allright says.
'We see clients trying to access our set of APIs rather than buy in a fixed product that sits on their desktop because they want to utilize the data and manage the data in different ways increasing deploying their own artificial intelligence – they want to commingle it with their data and create their own IP.'