FIS
Nancy Steiker
14 October 2025
Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Finance Times catches up with Nancy Steiker, senior director, global securities finance product management at FIS, on how the firm is developing services for the future
Image: Nancy Steiker
The technology landscape is changing dramatically and the pressure on market participants to eliminate inefficiencies and rethink legacy operating models is driving change at a different pace. How does FIS view the current market transformation?
The securities finance and collateral industry is still surrounded by tech components that have evolved alongside siloed organisations and operating models. This has led to rather fragmented system landscapes with significant amounts of data redundancies and an unavoidable need for synchronisation and reconciliation.
FIS is a prime example of a technology provider that has grown alongside this trend and evolution, with building best-of-breed solutions that have a unique selling point to provide support for specific product types, asset classes, and/or market segments. Market participants were forced to adopt two or three separate platforms to support their needs and global business operations.
Awareness that these legacy structures severely limit or prevent desks to progress their respective agenda and priorities is gradually increasing with market participants. The increasing cost pressure reduces the reluctance to actively evaluate alternative models that overcome present impediments.
All major investment initiatives that run under FIS’s modernisation and innovation programmes follow one common theme, which is addressing the securities finance and collateral value chain holistically. Consolidating best-of-breed solutions into a lean and modern tech stack that is interoperable with other vendors and market infrastructure providers, will rationalise complex system architectures and deliver more cost-effective solutions to the market.
That transformation has begun, with our clients adopting FIS’s latest generation platforms. Those actions are part of the wave that is delivering on vendor and technology stack consolidation, allowing siloes to be broken down and efficiencies gained. Competition for investment dollars is fierce, but the business cases for increased efficiency, better resiliency, and lower costs of technology ownership are compelling, driving the adoption of new services.Â
The new FIS Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Finance Matching Platform has been under development for some time. When can we look forward to this new service making its entrance?
It has indeed taken longer to bring to market than both FIS and our clients would have hoped. We are well underway with our third regulatory application process, which will add the EU to the US and UK licences. We are currently authorised in the UK, Switzerland, Japan, and the US — with Canada and the EU in process.
We have three clients signed up so far with more in active discussion, but we want to make sure we have sufficient liquidity to make real sense to the market and make the impact we are planning on. In Japan, for instance — the second largest market in the world by notional — we have very strong momentum, with 11 banks currently actively using our user acceptance testing (UAT) platform. This group is made up of three of the largest borrowers, including the largest online broker, and all of the large domestic lenders. We are very much hoping to share some good news with the market when that testing process concludes in Q4.
In the US, we have already connected the Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Finance Matching Platform (SFMP) to our existing platforms, including Smart Loan (now known as FIS Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Lending Trading App), benefitting more than 40 clients with immediate access, with no ‘technology lift’ on their part. It is clear from conversations with our clients that technology lift can be a major barrier to onboarding new services, however good the value proposition. By integrating SFMP with our existing platforms we remove much of that barrier to entry.
Liquidity is key to the success of any new trading venue, and with more than 250 existing clients, FIS Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Finance & Collateral is well placed to deliver that. While we are very much looking forward to being live and launching the service, this is not something FIS is rushing as this is a well-funded, long term strategic project for us, and we are very much planning to become the main provider in this space for many years to come.
The automated exchange/trading venue environment is beginning to look crowded. How do you see that playing out?
Competition in the marketplace should be welcomed and encouraged. It keeps organisations honest, investing in new services and pricing competitive. However, when we look at automated exchanges, there is an opposite force of liquidity. Too many providers risks bifurcation of the very liquidity that service aims to deliver.
SFMP has been designed from the ground up as a cross-asset, cross-product platform, meaning market participants will not need two systems for their equity and bond desks, even if those desks are separated business wise. What hurts the market badly is over-reliance on one route to market, and that cannot be allowed to happen again. On that basis, there is reason and justification to have two, or possibly three such services, but not more as the disadvantages will begin to outweigh the benefits.
What other major developments does FIS have underway?
LoaNext and its Global Trade Store is the newest member of FIS’s SF&C ecosystem. These innovations illustrate the modernisation strategy of change underway within SF&C. FIS is the world’s largest processor of securities lending trades — from trade capture through to settlement. This gives us unique insights into the causes and impacts of frictions in trade processing. The benefits of a consistent management of the trade lifecycle have been recognised though initiatives such as the Common Domain Model (CDM). The FIS Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Lending Processing Platform (formerly known as Loanet) ecosystem has been helping clients realise the benefits of collaborative trade and event processing for decades.
The Global Trade Store is a centralised trade record with real-time synchronisation of trades, it will allow us to increase efficiency and drive down friction in operational processes even further. The new, modular evolution of the FIS Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Lending Processing Platform with modern APIs and reporting tools, will also make the system more open and allow our clients to plug in their own innovations. Our initial focus is on North America, but we are designing LoaNext to be a global platform to reduce the friction from securities finance transactions in all the major markets.
Finally, there were talks of people nominating Global One for an industry lifetime achievement award. It has certainly been the foundation of many market participants for many years. What is the plan for Global One?
Yes, I heard that too! It is certainly an industry legend that has been central to the development of the global marketplace, so it should probably qualify.
FIS has spent a considerable amount of time modernising the legacy system and developing a next generation platform that is combining the middle and back office capabilities of Global One with real-time inventory management and modern trading tools to support the front office.
The migration of the 150 instances of Global One was initiated in late 2023 and is well underway. The migration process is assisted by a migration hub that automates large steps of the migration with a toolset.
We will have secured about 30 per cent of the existing client base on an SFTC contract by the end of 2025. With more than 150 instances of Global One around the world, this is a big, multi-year task but one that will cement FIS as a core provider for the securities finance industry globally
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