[ I N T E R V I E W
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J O S
of our existing business might go
into that model or they might not.
We can include asset classes in a
digital environment that might
not be tradeable or suitable for an
exchange today, so that’s a huge
strategic opportunity and lever for
us going forward.
On the Financial Information
D I J S S E L H O F ]
security centre or compliance util-
ity, where we do some KYC checks
or other things; there are many
different flavours there and we are
currently formulating what is the
right scope for that.
So, I’ve been quite active and
quite busy so far this year! In terms
of leadership, SIX was being run,
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side, we will continue to structure
the business which is profitable,
with a focus on regulatory, com-
pliance, tax and risk additional
services, as well as investing in
digital data analytics, adding value
to data, artificial intelligence tools
that our customers can provide
for the data and make the data we
provide readier to use. In many
cases people buy huge packets of
data and we need to do all kinds
of things to make it ready to use,
so we really want to move up the
value chain to do these things for
our customers.
In the Banking Services area -
the Swiss Franc payments, ATMs
and debit cards processing - that’s
where we see a huge opportuni-
ty to become more of a utility or
service provider to banks. We see
in Switzerland, and I think you see
it across the globe, that banks are
being forced by regulation and cost
pressure, who also probably see
more strategic opportunities for
themselves in the areas where they
are really focusing on the customer
and all the back-end processing
to middle-office activities. We get
a lot of demands for creating ser-
vices and providing services there.
That’s from certain administrative
processes to running their cyber
86 // TheTrade // Winter 2018
more or less, as separate compa-
nies, with CEOs of each division.
We decided not to have division-
al CEOs anymore; there is only
one CEO and that’s me. We have
business units and wherever it
makes sense to look at marketing,
communication, finance, and IT to
some extent, that are duplicated in
business units we have taken it out
and put it into a more centralised
model. There is an element of
greater efficiency, leveraging the
fact we are one company.
What are the key areas of innova-
tion and development that SIX will
be focusing on going forward?
JD: We take data from our own
businesses and from other pro-
viders, aggregate it and make it
the reference, then we farm it
out again. I think there is a huge
demand to not just be a raw data
provider, but really provide analyt-
ics, tools and added value on top of
that. I see that very clearly in the
regulatory, compliance, tax and
risk areas, where we have a huge
opportunity to move into those
fields. We see it already on the
back of MiFID II, where customers
didn’t have a choice: They needed
to buy services, so they were al-
most scrambling to get the services
in place, but there is a much bigger
opportunity and some of these
customers are saying they have
done this. However, now there
are a lot of other regulatory and
compliance jobs they are currently
doing which they don’t need to
anymore or maintain the pace of all
the changes, so they want us to do
that for them.
The general story in my view is
that we use tools to create more
value from the data, to be direct-
ly consumed by the customer,
addressing that middle layer
which is currently not there, and,
for instance, provide our data to
many institutions who have teams
who then cleanse the data, as well
as taking data from Reuters and
Bloomberg. It’s all very costly and
the overall cost of data is growing
continuously, so that’s where we
can really make a difference, creat-
ing extra tools and value in a more
utility-based way to drive scale.
There is never a silver bullet for
technology, it’s about engaging
with your customers, understand-
ing where their customers are
going and then being tenacious in
delivering solutions. There’s no
substitute for delivering what you
promise and just getting things
done. That is a change I want to
make with SIX; instead of talking
about potential, I would rather talk
about fewer things but get them
done.
What are the biggest market drivers
that are affecting SIX’s clients and
what are you doing to address these
issues?
JD: Cost pressure is going to be a
continuous focus for our cus-
tomers, so the focus, and perhaps
necessity, that might not have been
there in the past to do things at
scale will drive more business to-
wards us, because we are on the re-