Inflation uncertainty, market volatility, and economic recovery are increasing the pressure on capital markets to innovate. Clients and asset managers are all trying to figure out where yields and alpha will be, building new models and looking for strategic insights. 

Buy-side and sell-side firms realize that they need to speed up their time to market or risk being overtaken by faster and nimbler companies. Beacon can help capital markets adapt and thrive by increasing their flexibility, better leveraging available data, and enhancing their clients’ experience.

Increasing Flexibility

Whether your firm wants to get new instruments into the system, develop and test new models, or make better use of siloed skills and resources, moving to cloud-based systems can significantly increase your capabilities. Working with separate computers, spreadsheets, and individual development tools may seem faster and more efficient, but it constrains each team with limited resources and an incomplete picture. Beacon’s enterprise-scale cloud infrastructure ensures that everyone gets the compute and storage they need, at a fraction of the cost of dedicated servers. Secure, collaborative development environments and shared code libraries reduce duplication, getting the best pricing models and analytics to the top of the stack quickly and ensuring that problems solved in one location are available to everyone. Powerful software development lifecycle tools provide the necessary framework for governance and version control, while automated testing and code reviews speed up the deployment process. The result is faster, more consistent innovation throughout the organization, improving both adaptability and time to market. 

Leveraging Data

Inflation is impacting your yields, clients are looking for advice, and you want to quickly model different instruments. You can find data for almost any market, scenario, or analysis that you want to explore, but it has limited value if you cannot quickly ingest and use it. Unfortunately, moving quickly often means dumping the data into yet another spreadsheet, adding to the firm’s silos of information. Beacon’s data warehouse tools and connectors interface with most existing databases, giving authorized users easy access to a centralized information set. Powerful dependency graphs keep track of data changes and relationships, making it easier to trace calculations and boosting speed of recalculations. A bi-temporal data model updates instead of overwriting data values, making it possible to rerun calculations from any point in time to observe the effects of changes. Analytics-friendly languages enable quants to experiment with different models and scenarios, working iteratively with traders and business users to identify emerging patterns. The overall result is more consistent access to higher-quality data, which directly contributes to better quality analytics.

Enhancing Experience

Clients are always on the lookout for a better experience, whether that is increased transparency, greater personalization, or a more comprehensive view of their portfolio. Black box calculations and siloed information and applications can make it difficult to give them what they want in a timely manner. Beacon’s transparent source provides you with full details of any and all algorithms and models, whether they are core financial constructs or your own proprietary libraries. This modular code is designed to be modified and extended, and the integrated development environment gives your teams a head start in implementing new features and applications. As a cross-asset platform, Beacon inherently provides a consolidated view of portfolios, trading activity, and risk management that is more difficult to achieve with asset-specific systems. The result is a more adaptable and productive experience for your employees and your clients.

Embracing Change

Buy side and sell side firms and their clients are always looking at new instruments, exotic options, and complex derivatives to address their needs for hedging and risk management. As capital markets respond to current and future impacts, it will be important to proactively embrace the power of change and enable change agents within the firm. Providing your teams with Beacon’s powerful, cloud-based development environment, financial models, and front office applications helps build a lasting foundation for future innovation. Centralizing data, models, and applications on one platform makes firms more nimble, able to quickly develop and deploy new strategies, adapt to regulatory changes, and be better prepared for whatever comes next.