Victor Anderson: Welcome to the 2022 Sell- Side Technology Awards winners' interviews.

Victor Anderson: Now I'm joined by Kevin Moran, managing director, global head of business process outsourcing at Broadridge, which won the category for the best outsourcing provider to the sell- side in this year's SST Awards. It's a category that it won in last year's edition as well and it's a category that it is featured in prominently across a range of different WatersTechnology awards programs in recent years. Firstly, Kevin, it's good to see you again. Congratulations to you personally and of course, to Broadridge again for this win in this year's SST Awards.

Kevin Moran: Hey, Victor. Nice to see you again, of course. Always great to talk to you. The team and I are very excited about being recognised again by you and our clients, so thank you. Excited to be here with you today.

Victor Anderson: Absolute pleasure. Now, let's talk about the industry in general, Kevin. It has to be said that it's dominated by a relatively small number of large, well- established players that offer ostensibly the same or similar services. My question to you then is, what do you believe Broadridge offers the sell- side and of course the buy side to a certain extent as well, but primarily the sell- side that sets it apart from other similar providers in the space?

Kevin Moran: Right.

Kevin Moran: You're right, there's that handful of peers out there who are some of the large players and as we continue to differentiate ourselves out there. There's also a handful of really targeted and niche players, which focus on certain product types and asset classes and we're continuing to grow into that space. The nice thing is as we succeed in growing into some of those targeted areas and differentiating ourselves, I think the theme is the same for us in terms of how we do that.

The key has been aligning our successes, our investments, and our focus to those of our clients. We talk to our clients regularly. We make sure we have some strategy sessions on a quarterly or annual basis and the three themes keep coming up across. First is resiliency. From a resiliency perspective, it's important from a risk management and ops control resiliency. It's key now more than ever.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: We have invested quite a bit in our supervision tools, our supervisory stack both on the tech side, but also on the operational side. Also, Victor, I think we are a broker- dealer by choice. From a BPO perspective, we think that's important because being a broker- dealer aligns our governance framework controls and aligns that with our clients. So if we are operating in a way, it makes it better for them, so once again, are aligning our vision. Continuous improvement.

Continuous improvement is another theme that's constantly up there after resiliency. You notice I'm not saying a large upfront savings or cost optimisation for clients. That was a conversation that would probably be on the list a few years ago, but now when I talk to the head of operations or COOs of our clients is we want to show measurable progress every year. Of course, you want to optimise cost, but also scale, have risk mitigation. So continuous improvement through automation and transformation in the tech and ops stack is absolutely key.

What's interesting because you brought up the buy side as well is when you think about automation and you think about continuous improvement, I think the sell- side is a little more mature in this. The sell- side picked up some of these new tools earlier on, several years ago, and the buy side, although it's coming up the curve much quicker, let's say, has an opportunity to plug in to someone like Broadridge and a BPO and take advantage of some of the investment that's been done on that sell- side and bring it over. So that's an interesting piece there. And quite frankly, Victor, from my own experience from being at a standalone firm before here is, the ROI on some of these transformational business cases is a little bit tougher to get than if you're a part of a network or a community like the BPO where the patterns have greater exceptions, so you get a better ROI and then you can spread that across your clients.

I'd say those are two of the key. If there's one more, Victor, I'd say it's flexibility. If we have seen anything over the past few years, you talk about pandemics to your political or market environment, people want to have flexibility in order to be able to... They're not sure where their spikes or their concerns might be. Could we change the bank project? It could be a regulatory need. It could be a market environment. It could be seasonal stuff. So to be able to have a partner who can help them operationally and technology and adapt with them as their business evolves is key.

Those are the three themes that we focus on at least over the past year to really differentiate ourselves.

Victor Anderson: Okay. Good. Kevin, let's move on a little bit and talk. We cannot talk about the coup that you guys pulled off relatively recently, that Broadridge pulled off relatively recently, and that is the acquisition of Itiviti. It is a significant development in the marketplace given Itiviti's reputation, it's track record and it's areas of specialisation. My question to you then is how will Itiviti's products and services be folded into Broadridge's BPO business going forward?

Kevin Moran: Yeah. Thanks for that question. We are really excited about having Itiviti within the Broadridge family now, and actually, off the press, Itiviti has been rebranded as a Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions, still led by Ray Tierney. It's BTCS. Having them as part of the Broadridge family and their focus on the front office trade order and execution management systems, fixed connectivity, and network offerings, it's highly complimentary to our capital markets franchise and our capital markets capabilities, both Broadridge and other capital markets capabilities.

We see that driving significant value to the clients. It's enabling them to reduce risk, streamline or harmonise their technology and their operational stacks. When you think about the BPO, what does that mean for us? It allows us to start to further grow up the trade life cycle, so middle office, some front office operational functions. Having Itiviti as a technology, that software platform that allows us to wrap around is something we're very excited about.

And you're right, it's a big step for us. Watching Ray and the team integrate into Broadridge, the speed and the detail and the way they're doing is truly impressive. We've had opportunities to bring our teams together and see how we're going to maximise the value to the market. We're excited on what that looks like over the next 12 or 18 months.

Victor Anderson: Mm-hmm. Good. Yeah, certainly exciting times for the combined entity. Let's move on now and talk a little bit about specifically the BPO, because obviously, you're head of that business unit. To what extent has the BPO proposition to the marketplace being enhanced over the course of the last 12 months? In other words, what have been the key highlights or milestones that you are particularly proud of from your perspective and what has Broadridge added to the service over the last 12 months?

Kevin Moran: Yeah. First, I think everyone I've talked to over the past couple of years thinks that all these years blend together over the past years, so I'll do my best to stay to the 12 month.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: The first one is BPO-on-Demand. I think we touched on that briefly when we spoke this time last year.

Victor Anderson: Right.

Kevin Moran: BPO- on- Demand has gained a tremendous momentum with the market. At the highest level, to highlight, to describe what this is, it's a hybrid model between traditional BPO and staff augmentation, what most people refer to it as. Like a traditional BPO, someone on demand or BPO- on- Demand client will benefit from our outcome- based or quantitative service levels. You'll automatically drive into our follow the fund model and get access to our deep domain expertise as power users of our technology.

At the same time, as I talked about flexibility a few minutes ago, it allows our clients to say," Okay, I have an issue in this part of operations and now it's evolving here based off of some client onboarding or based off of some market condition or some event." It allows us to have those resources be fungible and start to move and step in already trained and ready to go. A BPO- on- Demand is something that has really had great interest and a big success for the last 12 months.

If I go down maybe a couple more, there's the DLR. We, Broadridge, both operationally partner with our technology folks to distributed ledger repo. So this is really finding a way. We're bringing a blockchain solution, cutting edge technology and op solution to really address the 10 trillion repo market and finding a more efficient and safer way for settlement and collateral management. We're currently live with that today from a tech and an ops perspective. About 10% of our client base for BPO has already subscribed to that.

I don't think we could talk about what we've focused on if we didn't talk about crypto and digital assets.

Victor Anderson: Right.

Kevin Moran: I'm happy to say that over the past 12 months, we have wrapped our BPO around our Shadow technology, our ShadowSuite software, which was a recent acquisition from a few years ago, showing how we continue to evolve wrapping BPO around that. We have a few clients on that now doing everything from asset servicing to reconciliation, supporting the digital assets in crypto space. If I slide a bit into some other functions which we don't typically talk about, we've seen a great need and have been able to help a lot of clients in alternative investments and loan operations, a loan servicing function.

Both of those areas, we do have technology which we wrap around, so we maximise that value for our clients as well. Those are the highlights, which it's been a busy year. You can probably.

Victor Anderson: Yeah. It sounds like it. My final question, Kevin, before I let you go and that is, we've just looked back at some of the key highlights of the last 12 to 18 months or so, let's not cast our minds forward. I'd like to pick your brain and find out where there's anything that is on the workbench right now that you are looking to release over the next, let's say 12 or 18 months, any new functionality, any new business units or whatever, any enhancements to various products and or existing services.

Is there anything that you are particularly excited about for the second half of 2022 and into 2023?

Kevin Moran: Yeah. First, as we just talked about, there's a lot to be excited about about the second'22 half of'22 and '23 and beyond. We talked about some of the product expansion or service expansion that we've had over the past 12 or 18 months.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: I'm excited first about further maturing that. As I talked about having that network value across a large client base, having the continuous improvement, maturing those offerings are absolutely a priority for us here to make sure our first adopters and our early on clients get a max benefit there first. In parallel, we talked about activity or BTCS already.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: I'm very excited about that and updating you on that in the coming months, just starting to see that front to finance chain as I like to call it.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: Another interesting point, which most people may not know is in the trade finance arena. In the trade finance arena, most people think of us whether we'd be capital market or wealth or buy side, but as we have very solid relationships with those clients, we started to talk to the other side of their corporate and investment banks on the trade finance side.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: There's a lot of opportunity where we can step in and help across supply chain, supply chain financing, lots of credit, those types of activities, where many people still have their own folks doing many of these non- differentiating functions. Also, there's not a lot of technology out there and many people are going to spend amount of money to build their own technologies around that.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: Also on this point, we have a partner and we have an investment in that partner of LiquidX, who is a very comprehensive suite of technology solutions for working capital trade finance and trade credit issuance markets. We have a few clients live already there. I'm very excited about how we get to grow that offering for Broadridge and for BPO.

Victor Anderson: Good. Good. Well, Kevin, that's a good point to finish our conversation on today. That just leads me to thank you very much indeed for your time.

Victor Anderson: I look forward to catching up with you in the not so distant future. Well, possibly, we'll be having the same conversation in 12 months time on the back of another SST Awards outsourcing category win. Good luck for the rest of 2022. It was a pleasure catching up with you again, and thanks very much for your time.

Kevin Moran: Victor, thank you very much. It's a pleasure talking to you as well. I said it last year and I'll say it again. I hope if we have the opportunity to talk to each other again next year, it can be in person and we have to do this.

Victor Anderson: Yeah.

Kevin Moran: I very much look on that. So thank you again. We are very appreciative of the recognition. Nice seeing you.

Victor Anderson: Thank you.