Victor Anderson:

Hello and welcome to the winners interviews of this year's Sell-Side Technology Awards. Now, earlier this year, Broadridge won the award for the Best outsourcing provider to the Sell-Side, thanks to its hugely successful BPO offering.

Now, joining me from Broadridge are Brian Hayes, Gurpreet Kaur and Jake Gravedoni. Welcome everyone. Congratulations to you and, of course, to Broadridge for yet another win on the outsourcing front, and thanks for spending a little bit of your time with me today.

Brian Hayes:

Good morning, Victor, and on behalf of Gurpreet, Jake and myself and the entire BPO team here at Broadridge, I'd like to express our thanks once again for the recognition of our business as a leader in the space, and we look forward to talking with you about both our accomplishments and how we got here, as well as some forward-looking thoughts on the business overall.

Victor Anderson:

Yep, yep, yep. Okay. Well, to that end, Brian, let's start with you and let's talk a little bit about the considerable success that Broadridge has enjoyed in their Sell-Side Technology Awards over the years, winning the Best outsourcing provider to the Sell-Side category for the past six consecutive years.

What do you see as the reasons for the firm's enduring success in the outsourcing space, Brian?

Brian Hayes:

Thanks for that question, Victor. I would say Broadridge's enduring success in the outsourcing space can be attributed to several key factors, right? The first of which, I would say, would be transformative technology, right?

We offer top-tier solutions for all stages of trade processing and integrate innovations like AI-powered OpsGPT into those. A second would be expertise and talent, right?

We employ industry-leading professionals, many of whom have direct experience from the client's operations departments, and ensures we have deep understanding and efficiency across all aspects of what we do.

A third would be operational resilience and risk management, right? As a FINRA-regulated broker dealer, we provide robust governance control and risk management across all global locations, right?

And the fourth and final one would be an extensive BPO network, right? By serving a diverse range of clients, we have the ability to leverage best practices to handle increasing processing volumes and market volatility efficiently.

Victor Anderson:

Good. Gurpreet, let's move on to you and let's talk a little bit about the reasons why firms on both sides of the industry, that is to say the sell side and, of course, the buy side, choose to partner with outsourcing providers such as Broadridge.

What are you seeing from the market in terms of the drivers pushing firms to consider outsourcing arrangements, and what are their foremost considerations, Gurpreet?

Gurpreet Kaur:

So Victor, as you can see, market demands are greatly evolving. Days of focusing purely on costs are behind us. Firms now not only focus on cost reductions through labor arbitrage, but also on how technology, particularly AI, can lend a helping hand in streamlining processes basically to drive change that result in regulatory compliance, risk mitigation and cost reductions.

Without integration of technology, firms will struggle to relieve the margin pressures and mitigate risk in a volatile market environment, which can be extremely challenging.

This will allow the business to continue to focus on facilitating growth initiatives and driving the bottom line. The need to do all of this while you're facilitating growth is the key.

It's not one or the other. So what we bring to the table is tailoring every engagement for our clients' unique needs. Our services are flexible and competent-based.

Clients can outsource their entire operation function from front office to post-trade, or they can migrate any individual function on a la carte basis, or they can call Broadridge staff and solutions to augment and support internal log resources.

What we also do is accelerated business growth, all that while lowering operation costs, which everybody loves. And that's the power of tech-led operations.

People want to see us maximizing efficiency, improving straight-through processing and bolster operational inefficiencies, reduce overall operational spend, while providing years and years and years of saving.

Providing enhanced transparency through real-time operation reporting and analytics to business stakeholders and designing an operating model for the business growth without incurring significant increase and operational expense is the thing that people are looking for.

When we talk about reducing operational risk, right? It's operational resilience and robust risk management solutions that actually provide enhanced security, reliability and peace of mind, which everybody in our industry would love that.

With our comprehensive risk analysis, proactive monitoring and contingency plan, clients can confidently navigate challenges and disruptions, ensuring the continuity of their business processes.

Victor Anderson:

Good, good, good. Jake, let's move on to you. Sorry for keeping you waiting for so long. Final question to you. Let's talk a little bit about the future of the BPO business.

What's on Broadridge's radar with respect to the future of the BPO business? That's the business process outsourcing business. And what new enhancements to the service has Broadridge got planned that will maintain BPO's position, and, of course, its relevance in what it has to be said is an increasingly competitive marketplace?

Jake Gravedoni:

That's a great question, Victor, and obviously whenever there's an increase in competitive market, that creates a lot of opportunities. So as Gurpreet mentioned, our focus is continuing to be and deliver on being a technology led BPO.

Now, what does that mean? Well, for us, it means leading AI initiatives for middle and back office services that help drives automation for clients, that results in cost and risk reductions.

Technology solutions continue to evolve and so does our understanding of these solutions. Some new enhancements that we have on the horizon include integrations into Broadridge's Operations Council and OpsGPT.

Broadridge's Operations Council unifies operations through a single user interface that enables the tackling of day-to-day functions and manages access to information and systems.

OpsGPT takes the Operations Council to the next level with the integration of generative AI. Currently we're in a trial program of this application with one of our partners, and we are quickly seeing the integration of these workflows with GenAI creates a deeper step change in productivity and governance for operations.

Broadridge already has success in creating GenAI applications such as BondGPT, LTX's GenAI application for corporate bond trading that is currently being used by over 700 traders today, as well as BroadGPT, which is an internal tool for all 14, 000 plus associates to use to assist with their day-to-day functions.

Through the use of Broadridge technology, our operational teams are able to deliver on improving operational control with real-time dashboards and notifications, improve operational efficiency and scalability, all while leveraging a chat-based interface, use the power of generative AI to sparse through complex data and get relevant business and risk insights, drive risk reduction by limiting human intervention, all while expanding our service offerings.

Victor Anderson:

Good, good, good. I think that's a great point to finish our conversation on looking into the immediate future and trying to figure out exactly where the future of the marketplace is and how Broadridge is going to maintain this position in that marketplace.

That just leads me to thank Brian, to Gurpreet, and of course, Jake very much for your time. Congratulations to you three again, but also congratulations to your colleagues and, of course, your whole entire business units at Broadridge, and who knows?

Perhaps in 12 months time we'll be sitting here again having a similar conversation because Broadridge will have won this category, again. Congratulations to you. Thanks for making the time to chat to me, and it's good to see you all.