Unleashing AI and Operational Transformation: Key Takeaways from SIFMA Ops San Diego

There was lots of energy at SIFMA Ops, San Diego, which continues to be a really good, worthwhile and well-run event. My 3 big takeaways are:?

1. US Treasury Central Clearing – Understanding Impact, Ensuring Readiness and Capitalizing on Opportunities?

With some concerns from participants on the industry meeting this deadline in 6 months, a great in-depth Broadridge-hosted session gave some good insights. The reforms are to increase efficiencies and reduce systemic risk by broadening the scope of transactions requiring central clearing. Moderated by Uday Singh , MD Broadridge , with insightful input from Anthony Pecorella, Jim Hraska, Matthew Douglas and Mark Pekala?the session offered a fresh perspective—framing how we might think about the changes by using options as the lens was really enlightening for me. It was refreshing to hear from these leading infrastructure players and, of course, leading banks, on how they’re aligned.??

2. AI: Seeing the Bigger Picture???

While it was impossible to ignore AI, much of the conversation focused on generative AI, chatbots and their roles in handling inquiries and summarization, which, while we agree is useful, represent only a fraction of capability. As Endava we showcased multi-agent diverse teams (agentic AI) at our Monday pm session, with live demos on our booth, drawing a lot of interest and expanding perspectives and gaining very positive feedback. For firms looking to really leverage AI’s power agentic AI is a gamechanger.??

One standout question in our session was when Tom Cohen was asked “It sounds very abstract but is it real?” we were then able to show that it was real. Having this demo was undoubtedly very powerful and although the model demoed is simplistic and was put together relatively quickly for the show we could do this because we have invested time and effort in building the framework. Reach out to us if you want to see what it can do for you. And for anyone who doesn’t know what agentic AI is – check out the sidebar below and find out more. ???

3. Operations Transformation?

Chris Perry in the ‘Owning Your Transformation Agenda - Building blocks for Success’ session on Monday asked what will the operations of the future look like. From the responses it’s evident that it will shift more to client focus and service but just how large should future operations be???

While discussion continues about leveraging tech and data more effectively, it’s also becoming clear that operations as is will be smaller. The role operations performs in managing risk and relationships is key and is one that is not going away, however wherever repetitive task are manually executed even those that require some judgement, and negotiations can now begin to be addressed by AI.??

Reflecting on my first role in the late 1990s, working trade support on the emerging markets bonds desk, I would manually input paper tickets, errors on these tickets were inevitable and led to many fun conversations with the desk on whether or not a specific bond existed. Today, we have automated platforms that ensure this is a non-issue, however operations has not really reduced in size as a whole.? The acceleration from a process focused organisation to a client service model will continue and we begin to see a scenario where using technology the right way, we will reduce direct costs, better manage risk and improve client satisfaction.?

Endava’s agentic AI industry accelerator.?

The big advance with agentic AI is that we create ‘teams’ of agents that collaborate on subtle and complex tasks in the same way as we do now with ops team members. This allows us to complete maker checker roles as well as more sophisticated roles that require negotiation and agreement.??

1. Agents have roles – with specific knowledge, objectives, biases and constraints?
2. Agents use tools – email, CRM systems, office tools?
3. Agents follow workflows – unlike conventional process automation workflows can be flexible and include value judgements, rather than strict ‘true/false’ conditional statements?
4. Agents collaborate – teams of agents collaborate on complex tasks, such as an onboarding process, together they work towards your stated goal.??

Agentic AI can be deployed robustly in almost any enterprise environment thanks to potent reference architecture. The ways in which results are reached are reported with transparency enabling use in strictly regulated industries.??

Visit our AI hub for more insight.

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