BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side compliance product (regulatory reporting)—S&P Global Market Intelligence Cappitech

Overview

S&P Global Market Intelligence Cappitech is a cloud-based, cross-regulation software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to allow financial institutions to comply with regulatory requirements via a single dashboard. It features connectivity to all main approved reporting mechanisms (ARMs) and trade repositories (TRs) for regimes including Mifid II; the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR); the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR); the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC); the Canadian Derivative Reporting regime; the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS); the Japan Financial Services Agency (JFSA); the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA); the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC); and FinFrag, the Swiss Financial Markets Infrastructure Act.

The solution  

The Cappitech platform offers a global approach to regulatory reporting alongside consistent and regular platform enhancements and integration across multiple regulatory regimes. Customers receive a single, integrated offering and local expertise in all regimes to monitor and manage multi-jurisdictional reporting, exception management, and KPI monitoring. They also have instant access to S&P Global Market Intelligence data and intelligence.

Secret sauce  

Cappitech views its global approach to be ahead of its competition in terms of preparedness, effectiveness and robustness. This was especially important ahead of significant changes to the global regulatory framework that occurred during 2024. Cappitech prides itself on its flexibility with respect to ingesting data and working with clients. It has developed a range of enhanced services such as reconciliation and exception management tools, the ability to reduce unique transaction identifier (UTI) pairing breaks, and managed services.

Recent milestones

• UTI Connect: Created for SFTR, UTI Connect is available for EMIR and will soon be for the JFSA. The solution is designed to reduce UTI pairing breaks and make it easier to find, correct and replace incorrect UTI details.
• Increased regulatory regime coverage: Cappitech implemented multiple additional regulations, including CFTC Rewrite Phase 2, EMIR Refit, JFSA and SEC10-C.
• Managed services: The offering has been expanded with more comprehensive stack assessment, dedicated onboarding resources and BAU support.

Future objectives

• Regulatory preparedness: ASIC and MAS are imminent, while 2025 and beyond will likely include additional changes. In addition, Cappitech will expand the variety of existing regulatory regimes it covers.
• Unique product identifier (UPI) enrichment: Working with clients to enrich UPI data points, including end-of-day lookup, UPI creation, and real-time API search

Why they won

S&P Global’s Cappitech service has picked up where it left off in this year’s Waters Rankings, winning the best buy-side compliance product (regulatory reporting) category in this year’s BST Awards. Unlike many front-office business processes, compliance functions do not offer buy-side firms the opportunity to carve out a competitive advantage. Regulatory compliance is a necessary cost of doing business for all firms, ensuring that they play by the rules and don’t fall foul of their respective regulatory authorities. 

However, it is also an absolutely critical function that buy-side firms must get right and must manage efficiently, accurately and transparently. To that end, S&P Global’s Cappitech offering takes care of all the regulatory heavy lifting, allowing buy-side firms to focus on their core function of managing investors’ money. Yes, they can manage their regulatory reporting in-house, although it makes no sense for them to shoulder that burden when there is a cloud-based service like Cappitech that can crucially interpret the regulatory minutiae and translate it into technology and operational imperatives, all while offering support for all major regulatory regimes via a single screen. Regulatory reporting is only going to become more complex and operationally onerous for the buy side going forward, which means increasing numbers of firms will be turning to Cappitech for support.