Trends Favor the Investor as Technology & Transparency Level Wall Street’s Playing Field

Trends Favor the Investor as Technology & Transparency Level Wall Street’s Playing Field

Insiders are forecasting a fully connected and transformed financial markets industry by 2015, as three rapidly emerging forces combine to create a rate of change unseen since the 1970s. And, in a notable new twist, it’s the little guy — the individual investor — who stands to gain power and prestige.

In a groundbreaking global survey, IBM, in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit, spoke to more than 400 executives who run 296 of the world’s largest exchanges, broker/dealers, asset managers, custodians, hedge funds and regulatory bodies. These executives overwhelmingly believe that more profit will flow to investors in an increasingly transparent marketplace. Traders, analysts, fund managers; all who stand between investors and their money will come under withering pressure to deliver or depart by 2015. Although merger-mania among the world’s exchanges grabs headlines today, three forces more primal than consolidation are expected to rearrange the tectonic structure of global capital markets by 2015. Complete marketplace transparency, instantaneous and uniform global networks and a growing need to commit to a permanent state of risk are the underlying forces bubbling up to shape the new single market for the world’s capital.

“The trader is dead, long live the trader! A financial markets renaissance” is available online at http://www.ibm.com/services/fm2015 “Power will shift from the traders who have benefited from merely facilitating transactions to the buyers and sellers who take positions on either end of the trade,” said Sarah Diamond, head of IBM’s financial markets consulting practice. “Ultimately, firms will need to reexamine their relationships with risk to uncover new ways to grow in the next decade’s renaissance.”

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