John Lothian News interviewed Martin Koopman, chief product officer of Broadridge, about his new position at the firm and the different businesses Broadridge is known for and expanding into. Koopman and Broadridge have a lot going on.
Broadridge has been known for capital markets, and is best known for its clearing technologies, Koopman said. They are also known for their investor communications business, focusing on regulatory communications.
In the last couple of years they branched into the front office trading business with the purchase of Itiviti. That put them squarely into the equities, listed derivatives and fixed income business.
They are also in the wealth management business and are building a new wealth management platform, whose first client is UBS.
Broadridge has long looked at the front office trading as a sweet spot, Koopman said.
The Itiviti business gave Broadridge the opportunity to bring scale and mutualization of some trading resources to customers, he said.
Koopman said that Broadridge thinks there are many inefficiencies between the front, middle and back offices and that Broadridge is now uniquely positioned to help bring efficiency to customers across all those parts of their businesses.
The wealth platform is aimed at banks and brokerage firms and is the first new platform built in a long time, he said.
Working with UBS, the platform is built so that clients can use the whole thing, or just modules of it.
Of the three or four other big trends Broadridge is looking at, AI is one. The LTX trading platform is one that uses AI to find liquidity in the corporate bond market, Koopman said.
Another area is blockchain. Broadridge has a distributed ledger repo project using smart contracts to transfer ownership. They have three customers live on this platform and are processing about $35 billion in transactions.
They are also working on data analytics and initiatives in shareholder engagement and ESG, Koopman said.
One of their biggest franchises is helping public companies with their annual general meetings. Broadridge is helping to democratize the investors’ rights and educate the shareholders.
They have worked to take a lot of friction out of the share voting system, he said.
Broadridge has some apps available on Google and Apple that help investors vote and keep track of their voting.
They have a product called ESG Analyzer that looks at hundreds of thousands of data points on ESG and looks at the ratings firms are getting on ESG. This helps firms look at where they stand on ESG issues, especially compared to their peers.
