“Doing More With Less” Through Fintech Integrations

Brett Turner:
Welcome to Fintech Corner. Have the fortune, good fortune…pun intended

Greg Fortuna:
Planned and fore intended.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, to have Greg Fortuna from State Street on. Here we are at AFP, and just there’s a buzz on the floor, lots going on. We announced the partnership together with State Street.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, very excited about that.

Brett Turner:
Super excited about a lot of things. But great to have you on the show. Care to introduce yourself?

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you so much. So, Greg Fortuna, I head up the GlobalLink division at State Street, which is all of our electronic trading, analytics, and clearing platforms. So, really excited about our partnership with you, obviously, especially in the treasury space, with our Fund Connect platform, and hopefully more to come with our complete arsenal of products.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, you look at the synergies too of why we partnered. I mean, this whole theme of data, APIs, analytics, so much of what we’re trying to do, all the things happening on the investment landscape, is just really starting to explode as well too. How do you see some of those kinds of things happening just as at the base of this partnership with so many jump-off points. They’re talking about

Greg Fortuna:
I mean, you hit it on the head. I think data, analytics, and automation are really the three key themes, right? And so, clients are all looking for those—the holy grail of making those all come together. And I think that’s where our partnership really, really shines. And you guys do an excellent job upfront of bringing all of the data together to get to a cash investable number. And then we sort of take over from there in a very seamless, you know, single sign-on way where they can see our application directly within your interface. 

They can trade out to over 400 funds, and then all of that balance information, all of that trading information, seamlessly flows back and forth. So that really hits on all three for them, and I think that’s key. That’s what people are looking for. You know, the days of the swivel chairs and the four different platforms on the screen and doing that, those are sort of over, and partnerships like this make it much easier for the clients to digest the information and execute on it.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, I love how you guys are just… you’re doing a lot. There’s a lot of things that you’re kind of… because I think that just opens up the playing field a little bit of the things that you guys can be more seamlessly integrated into the stuff that we’re doing together. But there’s so much more broadly in the investment landscape. Maybe use a little bit of a hockey analogy. I know you’re a big hockey guy.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, I’m a big hockey guy.

Brett Turner:
And maybe we were going to kind of introduce and dive in a little bit there. Yesterday, you were telling me that like you’re still playing.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah. I’m still playing

Brett Turner:
That’s amazing.

Greg Fortuna:
Don’t tell my wife. Yea I’m still playing, 50 years, 40 years.

Brett Turner:
She can’t listen to this?

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, she cannot listen to this. Yeah, I’m still playing. I’m still coaching.

Brett Turner:
That’s awesome.

Greg Fortuna:
You know, again, that game… a lot of parallels to this. I mean, that’s all about data and analytics. I coach a national-bound team right now, and we sit and analyze every piece of it. And then we try to put those into practice. That thematic is going throughout. But yeah, I love it. 

Brett Turner:
It’s that aggression on the ice, you know, playing over, like, all the things you guys are really doing that’s very progressive and aggressive to kind of get out and just continue to innovate.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, absolutely. And on the progressive side, I coach all-girls teams, which 10, 15 years ago weren’t really a thing. And now there’s… I mean, it’s great. We were actually in Nashville a year ago playing in a tournament, won the whole thing with the girls’ team, which is very cool. We actually entered an all-boys tournament with an all-girls team and won the whole thing. So, that was my little Nashville trivia. So, shout out to the Bay State Breakers. That was who it was. Yeah, it was great. It was awesome. It was fun.

Brett Turner:
Well, you look at now, taking that analogy from the ice into the investment landscape, a lot’s happened to you over the last few years. I mean, you look at the rate environments changing massively. Everybody, of course, is probably asking you now about where rates are going. They seem to be going down, but how are you looking at some of those macro changes impacting the business, or is it still kind of… it doesn’t deter you from… you’re just continuing to kind of drive around in this regardless?

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, so it’s a little of both, right? So we do what we do, we do it very well. We’ve been through up cycles, down cycles. Our platform’s been around for over 20 years. We were one of the first ones in the industry, if not the first in the industry. And so for us, we’ve seen it all the way down to zero, and we’ve seen it as high as five, six percent on the interest rate side over that period. And so on the way up and the way down, it’s critical that you provide the data to clients in a real-time fashion of what’s in the funds, what the duration of the funds are, what they’re looking like.

If you’re expecting a rate cut, you obviously don’t want to have a long-duration or short-duration fund depending on where you want to position and what you want to do on the way up and on the way down. So that information and being able to get that to clients in a digestible way, that’s key for us. And so we’ve got a product called Transparency Connect that sits within FundConnect that’s within your interface. One click of a button, you can see any underlying holding of any fund, you can see all the duration components, all of that. So just keeping clients informed and understanding what’s in their portfolio, where people are positioned, so they can properly position given the interest rate environments. You know, I leave the interest rate predictions to the others, but we just want to prepare them with all the data. So whatever happens, they can react accordingly.

Brett Turner:
When you look at, I mean, just even as we partnered, hearing, you know, there’s more and more I keep hearing what you guys are doing to like GlobalLink has 16 different tools or products within that. Fund Connect is obviously a key one we partnered on, but there’s a lot of things you guys are doing.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah. I mean, we have some of the world’s largest FX trading platforms in Currenex and FX Connect. We’ve got a huge middle and back office franchise in TradeNeXus. And then one of the interesting things that we’ve talked about is the transaction cost analysis, which we have across all asset classes. We have it across the short end fixed income side of the curve, long end fixed income, FX, equity, even digital securities and crypto. So it’s giving clients both pre-trade and post-trade, again, data and analytics around their trading and who they traded with and whether or not it was a positive or negative transaction on that side compared to what happened at the market at the time.

And we’re actually moving into a new area right now. And I think you and I have talked about AI and things. We’re not quite at the AI precipice, so my compliance department doesn’t come down on me, but we are definitely in…

Brett Turner: You still want to do that.

Greg Fortuna:
Exactly. That’s the beauty of the partnership, right? But on our side, we’re doing a lot of decision augmentation. For example, in our TCA platforms, we collect a billion data points a day. We’re able to then take those data points and provide information to clients to make better decisions even before they trade. Most TCA, it’s I know what I’m gonna do and then I’m measuring how well I do it. In a decision augmentation framework, you can actually say this is what you should do, right? And so using your own information. So we’re not giving a recommendation or anything like that. You’re putting in what’s important to you. You’re tweaking some parameters and then we’re giving you that information and saying all right, given all of that, what you wanna do, here’s what the outcome looks like.

Brett Turner:
We were talking a little bit about that yesterday. That sounds super cool. I mean, it’s a big part of the theme of Trovata. I mean, you look at so many folks in finance and treasury and investing and capital markets. Oftentimes it’s just if you don’t have the right data, you’re doing your own analysis. You’re kind of flat-footed when things hit. I think when COVID hit and everybody sort of flat foot, everybody’s always reactionary in a lot of ways. So this whole notion and theme of like being predictive, staying out in front, trying to like, here’s what it’s going to be before you get there.

Those kind of things are doable. I mean, the things that we’re doing now, see what you guys are doing with TCA and some of those other things here. 

Greg Fortuna:
And even on the Fund Connect side, there’s a perfect parallel for us because we’ve got something called Virtual Portfolio where you can run those scenario analysis based on things that maybe you guys are looking at from an AI space, that information, we can pump it in, pump it into a virtual portfolio. You haven’t made those underlying changes in your actual portfolio, but now you can track how that portfolio performs and the what-if scenario and then be able to click a button and implement that.

And so that’s key and core for clients because, all right, what if we get a 50 basis point reduction? What does that look like? How do I want to be positioned? What if I bought these funds and said, what if I extended out and got into the ultra-short duration bond funds, outside of money funds? What does that look like? They can do all of those and save those and they can run those along with the data that you guys are providing and really make better-informed decisions and have all that pre-work done. So when it does happen, they’re not caught off guard. They can click a button and go, that’s scenario C. Done. Click it and go. So it’s a lot of that just making them better informed and putting them in a better position for success.

Brett Turner:
Well, I think that alignment too, think of, there’s been for years, there’s been just so many point solutions to various things, but now kind of getting that ecosystem and broadening that and you look at having these various data sets and you look at like, we’re kind of really pioneering APIs on the banking side, that bank cash flow data forecasting.

On that operation side, all the under-vestment, at the end of the day, they’re just so synergistic. Getting your intelligence here and then now take action to really optimize that and the kind of things you guys are doing. Similar things, we’re just kind of meeting in the middle.

Greg Fortuna:
Absolutely, and we’ve done a ton of work on the API front, fix, swift, all of the, any type of connective tissue that we can do both with your system and just with clients in general. That’s really where we’ve focused. The other piece that we’ve done over the last couple of years is we’ve containerized our platform, so you see a lot of this technology around OpenFin and Finsemble and, you know, Glue 42 and all of these platforms that are out there. We’ve taken some of that technology, built it into ours, and we’ve stripped out our products into functional bits that can then be further integrated via API to any component within your platform.

So now we can take pieces from our TCA suite, pieces from our Fund Connect suite, pieces from our FX suite, we can put them together and create a custom client solution all single sign on, all no code, low code, all within the same interface that’s already embedded within your tool set, it just puts it all at the client’s fingertips. Because I think that’s the problem. You get all these great integrations, you get all this great data, sometimes it can be data overload and clients have to go to 10 different places to get anything. And what you’re doing, what we’re doing is really synthesizing that down to a very highly digestible unit and saying, here you go. And it’s all at your fingertips, it’s all right here, no more swivel chairs, no more multiple logins. It’s all here for you.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, I think that’s the other thing too. It’s like, you know, the term like data is the new oil.

Greg Fortuna:
Yep.

Brett Turner:
But if you don’t have things to take advantage of it, like if you just have a bunch of oil…

Greg Fortuna:
That’s correct. Well it also has to be clean oil. You put dirty oil in your car. Right. And that’s the same thing with data. If you don’t have a clean set of data and you don’t have that trusted data, you could run all the analytics, all the AI, anything you want. It’s garbage in, garbage out. And so having that clean set that you can trust, that you know has been vetted…And you guys have done all the hard work to put in the APIs to get it so it is clean. No one’s re-keying it, no one’s doing anything that’s gonna dirty up the oil, so to speak, to use the analogy. And that’s when the car runs the best, right? It’s crisp, it’s clean, it’s there, and you can count on it, and then you’re good to go.

Brett Turner:
Absolutely. The other thing we were talking a little bit about, like money movement. I mean, now, you talked about payments is getting in everything, but it really is. Taking action or just moving money is such a critical aspect. Direct Rails access, things are starting to really be more integrated on that front. You guys are doing some cool stuff around even money movement.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have a Global Link Pay product that we do where we’ll actually do, you know, in conjunction with our FX desk, we can do a full suite for a client allowance. We’ll do the FX on top of being able to make the payment, rather than a lot of times it gets separated or it’s through bank agreements, and you have to move it around, this centralizes again to that theme, right? Centralizing the process.

Making it more simplified for a client to be able to say, “Okay, I’ve got 200 payments to make to outside vendors in 10 different currencies. I want to just go in, make the payments all on a pre-agreed upon spread, pre-agreed upon arrangement, and I can make that transaction.” And so having that capability on top of pre-existing bank relationships and having an additional option. This is the Italian. I keep hitting the mic. Sorry. You know, we think that’s just giving clients choice.

And you guys do a great job of doing all the interconnectivity to the banks through APIs, through all the Swift messaging, everything else. So you’re giving the clients both ends of it. You want a fully automated solution? We have that for you. You want to use your bank partnerships? You provide an automated way to do that’s seamless. So I think it’s just synergistic. We’re trying not to be all things to all people, but you want to have options and you want to have choice. 

Brett Turner:
And you have to be end-to-end. These customers, you just get a half-baked solution, it’s not going to work.

Greg Fortuna:
Well, in the currency space, a lot of times it might be three or four currency pairs. You say, “You know what? I’m going to go with this solution here. That’s what I’m going to use for these currency pairs. The other ones, I have core key banking relationships I’m gonna lean on, and that’s what I’m gonna use for those.” And having that in the same interface, the same sign-on, the same everything, and not having to swivel chair amongst three different products, that’s huge.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, absolutely. How would you feel, some of the newer stuff too, what does it look like in terms of adoption? Again, it’s treasury folks, creatures of habit, right? It kind of takes a while to come in, just professional risk assessment. That hat goes on. a little skeptical. “Is this gonna work? And if it works or if I do this, like it has to work,” you know, so the tension can be high to make sure that you’ve got to execute flawlessly and all this. How are you seeing the adoption curve start to happen with some of the new stuff? Or is it starting to take hold? obviously there’s a little bit of a walk-before-you-run. But, you know…

Greg Fortuna:
For us, the two and a half decades helps us, right? We’ve been around. We’ve seen a lot. We’ve been through a lot. I think having the State Street name behind us, it’s a trusted name from that perspective. But having Global Link sort of be separate and distinct as an innovative solution set, I think that’s core and key. And then choosing the right partners who really represent the same values, the same innovation, the same thought process where people say, “Okay, if they’re putting it out, I trust it, and I know it’s going to work, and I know it’s been vetted and it’s there.”

We just rolled out that decision augmentation tool. We announced it at another show several weeks back, maybe four or five weeks ago. We’ve already got a half a dozen clients that have adopted it within four weeks. And that’s full-on; they’re trading across it. So that’s-

Brett Turner:
I think also, like, customers are just starving and hungry. Like, they’re ready.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah. And I think we do a very good job. We’ve done this together. When we go and sit with clients, we’re not making these things in a bubble. You don’t sit in some room and go think something up and go, they’re going to love this, right?

Brett Turner:
You don’t field of dreams. 

Greg Fortuna:
You preempt it, you talk to clients, “What do you need, where are your problem points, where are your pain points, what can we do to help automate and do that better?” And so when you come out with it, they know about it because they were involved in it. And when they have some sort of skin in the game and ownership, that makes all the difference in the world because they know you’re making it for them. You know you’re solving their problem. And then when you bring it out, they help test it, they typically agree to be a beta client.

And you give them a little bit of customization, but you do it in a way that’s easily digestible by all. The days of bespoke single solutions for every single person are gone, but you need to take that feedback, you need to put it in, and then you come out with a product that you’ve already sort of, you know that the market’s going to want because they’ve helped you design it.

Brett Turner:
Yeah, absolutely. So what do you think next year, looking out a little ways, you know, obviously AI’s on the, you know, weaving in on the roadmap. What other things are you excited about next year, year after, kind of what’s on the horizon?

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, I mean, like we talked about, we think we have a lot to offer, you know, across our entire suite and multi-asset class solutions. So we see this partnership continuing to grow where we build holistic solutions together for clients. I think you’re going to see a lot of change in the market. Most of our clients are doing more with less. Things are tight from a client perspective, so you really have to drive value and you have to be able to deliver things in a way. They don’t want to go out to 17 different vendors anymore. They really want to consolidate as much as they can. We see that as a big theme across.

And so being able to provide multiple services to a client and being able to do so in a way that’s cost-effective, cost-efficient, helping them drive alpha on that side. People didn’t really look at alpha on the treasury side, and now they are, right? They see the value in having better data, better analytics, making better investment decisions. It really moves the dial from that perspective across a number of asset classes. And we think we add a ton of value there, and then in conjunction with you, where you add all of that data and intelligence upfront. You know, to me, that’s the perfect marriage that’ll hit those themes as clients sort of mature into them.

Brett Turner:
I’m building these seamlessly. There’s always been sort of the clunky interchange. It just feels… and it’s to be able to have something really seamless is really hot.

Greg Fortuna:
And I think, you know, gone are the days of linear integration where you go into a system, you do something, it spits a file, you send it to the next system, it does it, it spits a file. Those days are gone, and it’s all about contextual sharing. It’s all about going in and seeing the information and having it upfront and being able to broadcast that information to whatever channels across our platforms that we do.

And that’s what this containerized solution allows us to do. A client now comes in, they look at their cash availability and, boom, Fund Connect pops up within your application. They don’t have to call it. It’s there. They see all the balances, they see all the history, they see all the information on the funds. They trade it, and, boom, it pops back on the other side, and it’s all there. So I think that seamless integration that’s not forced, where they don’t have to click and click and click. You just click a button, boom, it’s done. You do the trade here, and it flows. So I think that intuitive design is really helpful for clients.

Brett Turner:  Yeah, absolutely. I think to that whole theme of having to do more with less… I mean, a lot of that came when cloud hit 10, 12 years ago. And the IT profession changed massively.

Greg Fortuna:
Absolutely. We went through that transformation. We are now fully in the cloud. We’re on AWS. That’s a big move for us. It opened up a hundred doors that were… I mean, we can spin up an environment like that, you know, click of a button, we can spin up new environments, you know, we’ve got data disaster recovery that’s now three or four times what it was, you know, prior when we were on-prem. There are only so many data centers you can have around the world, but once you, you know, once you get into that cloud aspect of it, it’s just, it’s a different ballgame.

Brett Turner:
So many teams, like for years it felt like they’re… especially because there’s just lack of all that now finding its way though on the treasury field, it feels like this “do more with less” and then folks are just kind of starting to raise their hand like, “Yeah, but I’m literally going to break if I don’t get more help.” But I think that though, hitting some of that spot is a little bit more of a forcing mechanism. It’s like, “No, there is a way. There is a way to do it.” And getting that leverage through some of the newer stuff that’s happening, Trovata, some of you guys are doing, stuff with AI that’s coming is like, look at now agents and things like that to do real work. I mean, this is giving… I mean, this is where you get that leverage to not have that… to solve, really solve that problem.

Greg Fortuna:
Absolutely. I mean, we were doing poor man’s AI for a long time. Our virtual portfolio, things like that, where it was sort of being able to do scenario analysis. That was all the precursor to the AI, right? You were sort of doing it. Now the machines can do it. Now they can come in and run 50 scenarios for you, right? Where instead of plugging in two or three, they can run an infinite number and get you better data, get you better information and analytics.

We’re really excited about where it’s headed. And we just think, from a client perspective, the world is your oyster at this point. And as long as you have a good, clean set of data, you have good analytics, you have automation… if you’ve got those three things, you can open up the lens much wider and you can actually take in much more information and you don’t suffer from that information overload or that analysis paralysis because you just make it very easy for them to make simple decisions, to move the dial, to create alpha, and make it a more efficient process for them.

Brett Turner:
Well, the big question. I know you’re a big hockey fan.

Greg Fortuna:
The Bruins will beat the Predators tonight.

Brett Turner:
State Street has probably a lot more history than even the Bruins do.

Greg Fortuna:
Yeah, they do. 

Brett Turner:
But the Bruins are going to win the Stanley Cup this year. Like last year, it was going to happen, right?

Greg Fortuna:
If everything goes perfectly, they will have a worse regular season. And yes, they will win the Stanley Cup. They’re built for the playoffs. 

Brett Turner:
So that’s the precursor. They’ve got to not do so well in the season.

Greg Fortuna:
They’ve got to start tonight. They’re playing Nashville tonight. I will be attending so they better start this evening.

Brett Turner:
Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the podcast, Greg. Always a pleasure to chat with you and excited about all the things we can do together and just where innovation is going in the space.

Greg Fortuna: Yeah, we’re very excited as well. So thank you for having me.