How’s business at Wematch? Was last year a good year for you?
Last year was a very exciting and successful year for the business. We had very significant market traction after going live in September 2017. It was also an outstanding year for onboarding new clients and new dealers—that front of the business was extremely positive. The objective for us was to build out the brand, to communicate on our strategy as clearly as possible, and to get adoption from the banks. I believe we have managed to do this. We have made a solution, which is available to the industry, and has been recognised and even rewarded.
On the industry adoption front, we are now onboarded with 50 financial institutions, and we have reached the threshold of 650 users connected to our platforms. Overall, it has been a great success and we are happy with the way the market has welcomed the initiative.
What’s new at Wematch and what have you been working on?
Our strategy remains to build platforms for dealers and to roll out our horizontal development on a cross-asset basis. We have launched our securities financing solution in 2017, and the proof of concept (POC) is now allowing us to develop new platforms in a partnership model. We can now leverage on our experience through the securities financing products and on the onboarding, which is allowing us to welcome new teams, new desks, and new users very quickly.
We have launched two new platforms: Wematch equity derivatives end 2017 and Wematch delta one in September 2018, which has enabled us to enrich our asset class coverage and to welcome new dealers into the Wematch community.
We have also launched a collateral optimiser feature allowing our users to rebalance their collateral pools and automatically trigger recalls/unwinds as per their needs, opening our platform into loads of possibilities on the post-trade and trade lifecycle events dimensions.
Implementing partnerships with banks is proving extremely powerful, and the association of our technology with market expertise is a fantastic recipe for success. At this stage we have launched two major initiatives: the first one is with J.P. Morgan on interest rates and the second one is with Société Générale on equity derivatives. The idea of partnering with those banks allows us to benefit from market expertise and help deliver the best platform on those specific asset classes. Those partnerships will allow us to embark all dealers to contribute and help to build the platforms which are designed by the banks and for the banks.
What does your new role involve?
The new role is a natural evolution of our development. Moving away from a ‘single asset class’ dimension into a cross-asset platform, there is a need to structure Wematch on a cross-asset basis.
We will also be looking at expanding the team and increasing our product capabilities as the company continues to grow.
We will be pushing as well our offers on a global basis and will be looking at expanding in the US and in Asia with a physical presence as a natural evolution of our current footprint in Europe.
What will be the biggest challenge for Wematch this year and why?
Our first challenge is to manage the growth and the development we are seeing at Wematch. This is obviously very exciting and goes through a lot of different stages from corporate governance to adapted organisation. I believe this is called growing up!
In terms of industry challenges, we are facing the spectrum of SFTR that is keeping all our clients busy. It will also have some impact on our product offering, especially around the creation of the unique transaction identifier (UTI). This is a huge challenge at the industry level but hopefully, it will provide greater transparency.
On that space, we do believe that the solutions we are putting together are helping for more transparency. A platform gathering interests anonymously and used widely by the industry should increase transparency and facilitate price discovery. We are looking closely at the regulatory environment on each asset class and driving our roadmap and matching algorithms with full respect of the regulatory requirements.
Finally, connectivity and interoperability remain a very strong driver for Wematch. We look at connectivity through the client angle (with the ability to implement APIs and interfaces with our clients’ front-to-back systems), through the exchange angle (connectivity with exchanges and clearings houses), through the third-party providers angle (tri-party collateral agents, post-trade services providers), and last but not least through the regulatory angle (APIs with data repositories and pre-trade and post-trade reporting service providers).
← Previous interview
Clearstream Banking S.A.
Philippe Seyll
Next interview →
Northern Trust
George Trapp
Image: Shutterstock 
