Traders Magazine spoke with Mike O’Malley, Head of GlobalLink Digital, which won Best New Product at the 2023 Markets Choice Awards.
How did your product come about, what gap in the marketplace does it aim to fill?
GlobalLink was developed for investment professionals using multiple disparate systems who want to make faster and more informed decisions. Our product unifies the desktop environment so that market participants can create and operate easy-to-deploy and customizable trading and workflow solutions through our open, interoperable architecture. GlobalLink supports the distribution of State Street and third-party products while dramatically enhancing our client experience through a cutting-edge design system and single sign on framework for traditional and digital assets.
What is your outlook for buy-side trading/technology?
The buy-side continues to wrestle with pressure on margins, with clients expecting asset managers to prove that their trades are being executed at the best possible price, using the most efficient methods. At the same time, trading desks are dealing with fragmentation of liquidity and need to adopt more advanced trading techniques as a result of the continued electrification of trading. Asset owners have their own challenges, with new regulatory directives in place, demanding that both pension funds and insurer have a strong understating of execution quality.
Our global suite of award-winning electronic trading platforms is designed to increase transparency, improve efficiency and deliver quantifiable best execution. Our aim is to enhance and preserve the value of our clients’ portfolio to achieve better outcomes and gain insights. We back our multi-class asset trade execution with technology designed to help manage risk.
What are market participants’ trading needs and how are they evolving?
Market participants face increased complexity in their day-to-day workflows. Beyond precious time lost swiveling between fragmented data, inefficiencies can lead to costly errors or missed opportunities. Closed architecture, operational challenges and high costs of integration prevent adoption of best-in-breed solutions. Operating efficient front-end technology should not be one of our greatest industry challenges – GlobalLink is leading the transformation by delivering efficiency and connectivity through our customizable solution.
What are your company’s long-term objectives and ambitions?
We are focused on providing clients with specialized solutions and tools to help them better serve their clients.
What are recent accomplishments for State Street?
Throughout the year, Global Markets provided clients with much-needed liquidity across a number of our products, including the Direct, Indirect, and StreetFX℠ trading solutions, GlobalLink, and our algorithmic trading offerings. We expanded our FX trading capabilities with private market clients, where we see significant growth opportunities, and our industry-leading currency management solutions continued to garner strong client demand in their 30th year of business.
What are your current initiatives at State Street?
Broadly, we are driving a combination of growth and returns by investing in the future functionality of our products and services and expanding our geographic reach, which is resulting in better outcomes for our clients by providing innovative liquidity, financing, and research solutions to investment professionals across the investment management process, on a global scale.
What can we expect from State Street in the nearest future?
Going forward, we will continue to develop innovative products to help our clients grow and drive geographic expansion, particularly by investing in technology to develop state-of-the-art trading products, extending regional FX capabilities in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, and enhancing our securities finance offering in Europe. We will also continue to expand our credit syndication offering, taking a targeted growth approach within certain products.
Our Markets and Financing business will continue to reinforce the firm’s diversified growth trajectory in an increasingly capital-efficient way. As we advance our strategic growth agenda by leveraging technology and best-in-class partnerships to increase productivity, enhance the client experience, and create new revenue opportunities, we will continue to serve as a leading provider of liquidity, financing research, and credit to institutions worldwide.
