Adrian Morris, head of consulting at MX Consulting, explains how his firm is helping clients reduce their costs and increase their revenues
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Adrian Morris, head of consulting at MX Consulting, explains how his firm is helping clients reduce their costs and increase their revenues
SLT: What does MX Consulting do?
Morris: We are a business that specialise in securities financing and other structured products. We work on both business and IT related projects. More often than not the two go hand in hand; our principal object is delivering well managed change into client organisations. One of the advantages that we give our clients is that we have all come from the securities financing industry, either from the business or IT side. Our consultants tend to have in excess of a decade or more experience in the industry.
SLT: How is this of advantage to your clients?
Morris: Well I think one of the biggest problems clients have is creating teams of people for specific pieces of work who understand what is required by the business and what to do during the life-cycle of any project to successfully deliver it to a conclusion. We are able to bring in either specific expertise or a team of people who have the required skill sets and who have most importantly been working with each other for a long time.
SLT: Why is this important?
Morris:It is very difficult to go out and either source individually or create a team of people who often do not know each other or each other’s capabilities and in a very short period of time gel that team together to deliver often large and complex pieces of work that may have considerable revenue drivers or cost implications if badly run. We offer a specialised service from programme and project managers to business analysts and developers, some with very particular skill sets within securities lending such as Swift messaging expertise. Most importantly we all have a good understanding of the client’s business as well as how to get things done in the business and IT world.
SLT: Is this more efficient from a cost perspective?
Morris:We are commercial in terms of our rates. We have a reputation with our clients of delivery to schedule and this means we are often reducing overall expenditure on delivery versus projects that overrun and overspend.
SLT: What type of work have you been involved with in recent years?
Morris:All types and quite varied. We became responsible for the delivery of the 4Sight system into Aviva Investors replacing Global One in 2008/2009. This was a very complex project as some of the proprietary systems such as fee billing and income processing were reverse engineered into 4Sight. We have a great deal of Global One knowledge and to that end we have built fee, income, messaging, collateral management, cash payment and other proprietary systems that are fed by Global One over the years to enhance clients straight-through processing capabilities and reduce operational risk. We are used to working with the front office directly with traders through to the back office operational areas and understand how the two interact. Understanding the realities of this business environment is to key to delivering change successfully.
SLT: And currently?
Morris:As an example we are currently running a large programme for an investment banking client that will enable it to automatically move available equity and fixed income positions between their agent lending, principal and repo desks via normal stock loans and repos which will have a high and positive impact on revenues. This is a very large piece of work involving almost every system in each business and has required us to solve complex issues with the front and back offices of each business. We will also be working on a project that upgrades Martini to Apex in the next few months as well as compliance and messaging project work for another agent lender client.
SLT: Is your work often revenue associated?
Morris:Mostly, yes. We are more often than not involved in projects that either enhances revenue by increasing desks’ ability to trade or optimising flows which enhances profits by cutting overheads. It is also important to remember that traders cannot increase their volumes without increasing their STP rates in the back office so we very much take a front to back approach.
SLT: What do you think you will be focusing on in the next year or so?
Morris:We are one of the few consultancies that have managed migrations from Sungard’s Global One to other vendor systems; certainly we are aware of businesses more generally reviewing their trading and operational systems. Many have tangled system legacy issues that need reviewing and we think our experience makes us particularly relevant in this area. Projects of this nature are complex, require lots of experience and if badly run can become extremely expensive.
We also know a lot of businesses are now looking very carefully at processes that have in the past been very manual or spreadsheet orientated with a view to reducing risk. They are looking at better ways to optimise their business, collateral management being a particular issue since the demise of Lehmans. We built a cash and collateral management system for Paloma Securities (Now Bank of Montreal) that has been very successful and we think this type of experience and our approach to delivery is what clients want.
SLT: How do you deal with clients, what is your approach?
Morris:We usually recommend starting any engagement by having one or two senior consultants spend a few days with the client to get an understanding of the work. We like to do workshops with lots of people involved, understanding the strategic drivers and the clients’ requirement is clearly the correct starting point. We take the information away and then create a short summary of what we think the client needs to consider, what the structure of a project should be, how we see the deliverable and the associated timelines and cost. This is a good approach, we like to keep everything very open and engage with the business, IT and other interested parties like compliance and risk and it is always, after all, a joint effort.
SLT: What are the aims of the business in 2011?
Morris:We want to become more recognised in the securities financing industry. We have been very successful at delivering projects for our current clients though maybe not so good at making this more generally known. We feel the industry needs specialised and focused securities financing experience to manage change and that too often failure happens as either the wrong people are engaged on projects or there is not enough experience to structure and manage work to properly engage the sponsors and involved parties properly.
Businesses need people who can deal at all levels of the organisation and are not afraid of making it clear when things are not right. We are in the business of delivering change, clients need clarity to make the correct decisions and they should always be in the driving seat making those key decisions throughout the life of any programme of work.
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