With its data, technology and expertise across asset classes, IHS Markit has developed its offering to adapt to new regulations and help clients fulfil their reporting and compliance obligations.
This year will be remembered for Covid-19, but for IHS Markit this has been a period in which it has also navigated its clients through fundamental regulatory changes — be it the transition away from Ibor to new risk-free benchmarks or the new reporting requirements related to the Securities Financing Transaction Regulation.
The company has also expanded its product suite. In May it launched its Risk Bureau product and app to help both buy-side and sell-side clients navigate regulatory risks in real time.
A year before, it launched Onboarding Accelerator, a new solution to help banks and other service providers open accounts with institutional clients more quickly.
Onboarding Accelerator is built on Counterparty Manager, a service used by 12,000 buy-side customers and more than 150 dealers, brokers and other financial services providers to centralise the exchange of documents and data related to know-your-client, account onboarding and maintenance.
Over the past 12 months, IHS has signed up 51 clients to Onboarding Accelerator — and they have embraced the service, sending more than 5,000 onboarding requests.
The firm’s regulatory and compliance business has proved nimble, combining its open technology offering with a diversified client base to help clients overcome the numerous data and technology hurdles they face in trade reporting.
“We have a global distribution of clients across EMEA, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region, says Darren Thomas, managing director of the regulatory and compliance division at IHS Markit. “We also have regulators in those different regions using our product, so that gives us that feedback loop to know we are on the right track with servicing our clients.”
Thomas adds: “Rather than just looking from a compliance perspective, our approach and technology give our clients a way of having a competitive advantage so they get better hedging, better risk insights, better pricing as well as all important regulatory compliance.”
