The Differentiation Challenge
Institutional stockbrokers, either as independent broker-dealers or as part of larger investment banking groups have fought the differentiation battle hard over the years. Apart from product/service offering, breadth, and depth of market coverage, their overall service level engagement has determined their pay out from their clients.
Winning the service level engagement battle is challenging in the best of times. However, in the absence of smart tech solutions to help drive greater impact in the client engagement journey, the task is almost insurmountable. We believe ANALEC with its deep domain knowledge and over 20 years of serving institutional brokers has what it takes to help you differentiate your offering.
Research is not bought, its sold!
Many of us have heard this before. Research services remain a large part of the attributable revenues at full-service institutional broker-dealer. The investment research (as a service) delivered by broker-dealers and banks requires careful curation and targeting to the right audience to grab mindshare and recall value with the client base as well as have a pronounced impact on the investment process of an institutional money manager. Merely putting the research product out on the proprietary corporate research portal, third-party aggregator portals, and/or via links to individual email addresses delivers little client impact! The research idea must be “sold”; by directly engaging the client.
The philosophy of client engagement to get maximum client impact on a vital part of the service (i.e., research product; corporate access etc.) requires concerted efforts across the entire client service organization at a broker-dealer.
How do I get paid?
The stock broking industry is perhaps the most unique when it comes to getting paid, unlike any other commercial relationship for services delivered (and consumed). Your clients decide what they wish to pay you after having consumed your service and reflecting on its effectiveness. You (i.e., the broker-dealer) as a service provider are a “price taker” rather than a “price setter”. While over the years your clients (institutional investors) have scaled back on what they pay for research and “value added” services, the market still pays for service level effectiveness and service impact.
We believe putting in place the right tech tools and capabilities to support the client service organization is a necessary investment to drive higher pay outs from your client base.
Service level Transparency and Accountability
Institutional money managers find increasingly greater scrutiny on how they spend their resources to pay brokers and banks for their services. Commission un-bundling initiatives across many jurisdictions brought about significant accountability pressures on all broker-dealers and banks; with intense competitive pressures setting the tone of all engagements. Delivering greater value and maintaining greater transparency in services delivered is increasingly the mantra by which broker-dealers and banks set their engagement model with their clients (i.e., institutional money managers).
We believe smart technology solutions harnessed in the right manner delivers enormous value to broker-dealers and banks when it comes to supporting their research, sales & trading operations to win over the competitive challenges in the market.
