Interviewer: Thank you so much for coming to chat to me. We start off with could you give me your name and the company that you work?

Ofir Gefen: Yeah. So I'm Ofir Gefen. I am from Broadridge and more specifically I'm from Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions, formerly known as Itiviti.

Interviewer: So what have you learned from your participation at Trade Tech this year? And can you give me any insights at all?

Ofir Gefen: So thank you very much again for for the question. And thank you for having me and thank you for WBR for having this conference. It was really an amazing two days you know to walk around here and meet you know both the buy side and the sell side and hear so much about what's going on within the industry. And one of the key things I've learned over the last few days is that, you know, both the buy-side and the sell-side are facing some serious challenges. Some of these challenges have been around, you know, even since before the pandemic, but they've seem to be aggravated. I've heard challenges around finding and sourcing liquidity, and these challenges seems to be very real because they are causing investors globally to reexamine, you know, if they want to come into into Europe, into the European marketplace.

Obviously, if it's harder to get in and get out on the trade, you're you're reconsidering whether you want to invest your money. And those challenges are coming not only because of new regulations. I know that the SEC is planning some new regulations, and I know MiFID is being looked at again because possibly it's not been as successful as people had hoped it would be. But that happened the fragmentation of the liquidity. But that's not the only problem that the market is seeing. The market is also seeing problems in sourcing market data and having a consolidated tape. I've heard many buy-side and sell-side clients talking about their difficulties in figuring out the payment structure for these for these different venues and how exactly that should work. That was incredibly insightful to hear that and to hear that from both buy-side and sell-side themselves. And obviously challenges are a little bit different between one and the other, but they both are facing these same challenges.

Interviewer: So what has changed since the acquisition by Broadridge of Itiviti?

Ofir Gefen: So yeah, so we've you know, we've now finished the acquisition. I would say most of the integration is done, we are two years into this journey. It's really been an amazing and a fantastic journey. And I think, you know, we had a few things as we came into the acquisition. We had a certain mindset, but but a lot of things I think in our mindset have changed as well. Some of our key initiatives have really stayed the same. You know, we're very focused on providing the best in class OMS solution for the sell side. We've been working about this even before the acquisition because of changes in the marketplace and we continue to have, that has not changed. If anything, you know, Broadridge has invested more money in us growing that OMS proposition in the US, in the UK and in Hong Kong. But some things have changed and I think change for the better.

One of the key things that Broadridge has brought to the table and we were able to collaborate is what we call the Trade Lifecycle Simplification. There was a press release about this I believe yesterday and really this talks about how we bring the front and back together. So now as Broadridge, we actually have a front, middle and back office all linked together into a single solution. And I want to spend a few minutes on talking about the single solution. But before I go there, what I wanted to say is this is no more a pipedream. This is something that we've been working on for two years and we've now actually been demoing to clients. And we actually have two active clients interested in acquiring that solution. What that solution means is you can essentially acquire a system that allows you to go through the full trade lifecycle from order origination, acceptance, trading, settlement - through what is normally known as the middle office or allocation confirmation - and into the settlement and clearing.

All of that, usually people have three or four different systems in their kind of stack to do that. What we're able now is to offer a single solution. Now, by offering a single solution, we are not taking away clients’ ability to say: “No, you know what, 2e only want the front end or we only want the middle or we only want the back.” You can still absolutely do that. But what we're saying is by having a front, middle and back, we are solving a lot of the problems that people have with inter system connectivity, more, you know, having more interfaces, reduces flexibility. But more importantly, you you get a single data stream across your front, middle and back. And data, as everybody knows, is one of the key things and one of the key drivers, you know, for insight and so on, once you have a more holistic data structure that you can do across front, middle and back, you can take more insight, but it also reduces your cost of ownership. And we are estimating the reduction in cost to be between 20-30%. You're also getting the ability to know your clients better, but you also gaining flexibility for your own business. As your business grow, it is easier to deal with a single vendor that can help you across the lifecycle and not have to have four or five different conversations. So not only is it unlocking cost savings, it's also giving greater capabilities for businesses to grow. And this is, I think, a win-win for both of us.

Interviewer: Final question then, how can the new Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions business and Broadridge help with the challenges that your clients are facing?

Ofir Gefen: Right. So we started this where we said, look, there are a lot of liquidity challenges, there are some cost challenges, there is new regulation coming that definitely increases cost. I think by by Broadridge really being able to be a single vendor that provide across the trade lifecycle, we can we are well-positioned and probably better positioned than anyone else to help our clients live through this and really allow them to focus on where they add value. I think clients can add value. You know, brokers can add value with adding liquidity, but do they necessarily add value by building market connectivity or client connectivity or, you know, a settlement system?

No, that's not where they should focus their energy. Right. They should focus their energy where they can really add value in solving these liquidity issues, these regulatory questions and so on. Where we we are coming to do is take all of that kind of burden of thinking about, well, how this all played together from a technology perspective and give a single solution to our clients to address all those problems. I think this is one of the key things we can provide our clients in this day and age, and I think that would allow them to focus more on the problems that we've heard in the conference and to focus their talent and their know-how in resolving that rather than dealing with how do we do it from a technology perspective.