Nick Parsons of Bravura Solutions talks to Jenna Lomax about becoming a CEO during the COVID-19 pandemic, the changing face of transfer agency, and the company’s upcoming ventures
Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what led you on the path to becoming CEO at Bravura Solutions?
I am a technologist at heart and I have been working in the software industry for a very long time now. I was at DST Global Solutions for 13 years (now owned by SS&C Technologies).
It was there that I worked on the manufacturing side of the industry, selling fund accounting solutions for people that actually build the funds, whereas now my work with Bravura is very much more on the distribution side of the industry.
I have been at Bravura for 15 years, first joining as chief technology officer to work on developing our Sonata programme, and then I moved into sales — taking the proposition out there to the market.
This was during the time that Bravura was signing mandates with Fidelity, Citi and Prudential (now M&G). I served as chief operating officer at Bravura for 10 months before becoming chief executive in early September last year.
For those readers who may not know, what are Bravura Solutions’ unique data solutions offerings to the market?
To give a clear overview, we are essentially a software product company, first established in Australia. As well as offering software products, we conduct all of the implementation and support services you would expect around them. Many of our products are now cloud-hosted, on a fully managed service basis.
Listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, Bravura has 17 offices across the globe and around 1,500 employees serving some of the world’s leading financial institutions, as well as a collection of really interesting innovative small businesses.
Historically, the business has been split into two streams. One deals with the fund administration side where transfer agency (TA) systems sit. The other stream is very prominent in the wealth management space, in terms of providing systems to support retail products. This involves dealing with onshore and offshore bonds and general investment accounts, across a range of different asset types. So as well as funds, we have got full support for equities and a rich ecosystem for these operations.
In recent years we have made a series of acquisitions. We have acquired FinoComp which has given us a really strong set of microservices, adding to a powerful payment processing micro service, Babel. We have also acquired Delta Financial, which has a really good set of complex pension offerings, as well as Midwinter, an Australian-based company, which has a very powerful financial advisor solution.
The last two years have been an unprecedented and a challenging time for everyone. How did Bravura weather the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how did Bravura support its clients through that time?
It certainly has been an interesting time to run a business and an interesting time to take over as the chief executive. From the very first week of March 2020, we put a huge focus on our people — to make sure they were safe, felt safe, and that they had all the resources they needed. From the get-go, we had a daily crisis call with people from all across our different regions. From conducting those calls we were able to inform and take the learnings from one region to another. As we know, the pandemic unfolded in different ways in different places.
For instance, New Zealand came out of lockdown much earlier than anywhere else, so we were able to really pioneer our programmes around flexible working there. Sadly, COVID-19 hit our people in India very badly last April. We know that a lot of our employees and their families were affected, which was very difficult. However, one of the things that really helped us through this was our infrastructure and our collective working culture.
We moved offices in London three and a half years ago, and in India two and a half years ago. When we moved, we put everyone on hotdesks, gave everybody a laptop — irrespective of their job — and got rid of all dedicated desks and telephones. Therefore, when lockdown came, we were very well-geared for working from home globally. We were in the best shape we could be professionally, for the time we lived and worked through.
2021 was marked as the year that things slowly got back to “normal”. What are some of Bravura’s key highlights from last year?
Diversity and inclusiveness is very important to us as a business. It is one of the things that makes a great workplace. Collaboration is a really important value for us, both internally and externally. Being able to create an inclusive environment is one of the things that really helps foster that.
We have also launched a really good mental health initiative, BWell, in partnership with the City Mental Health Alliance here in the UK, which is really powerful. Everybody has had times where they have struggled over the last couple of years.
This year is not necessarily any rosier. We always remember that people are our biggest asset.
Bravura has a significant presence in Australia and acquired major Australian software company FinoComp in late 2019. How has this acquisition developed since then?
It has developed really well. The essence of FinoComp is the microservices approach — attacking a given problem by building a series of modules. These are independent, standalone pieces of software that can be deployed in lots of different configurations. This was the route that Bravura was going down, prior to acquiring FinoComp.
With a microservices approach what we can do, for instance, is rapidly calculate fees and charges externally, and then load them into a core system in a timely manner, which can be a challenge for some of our competitors’ systems.
We had already started building some smaller pieces, and deconstructing some of our bigger software solutions into families of microservices. Acquiring FinoComp gave us a sound base of new microservice products and a really enthusiastic customer base with this sphere of technology, accelerating the process.
We now have customers that sit across the transfer agency and wealth space, who have the same microservices deployed — this demonstrates us having a family of products which we can flexibly deploy to solve problems across the value chain.
How can Bravura’s solutions come into play to help clients meet regulatory compliance?
Regulation is of course an area we could talk about for days. As for the microservices themselves, they are very good at helping people address the immediate regulatory need. We have solutions for tax reporting, performance reporting, and compliance reporting for significant parts of regulations, such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive’s costs and charges rules.
One of the most important areas impacting clients is information security. We provide our product on a fully-managed service basis.
As you would imagine, there are meetings with auditors annually. With this in mind, we have invested heavily in Infosec to comply with ISO/IEC 27001. Of course, also on the horizon, we have the Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Principle. It is a good and well-intended set of rules, and it is all about getting the industry to treat clients with proper due care and attention. The proposals are not just about doing the right thing, but about having the right data to be able to prove that you are doing the right thing by your clients. The consultation has already kicked off, with a suspected publication date of the findings at the end of July. From there, the industry has been given a nine-month implementation schedule.
That is not very long at all when considering most of our clients will run a rolling 12-month change programme where everything they are doing is mostly mapped out, including projects such as Pensions Dashboards. This means that many businesses will be tied up with the implementation date and will not necessarily have the bandwidth to do all they intended to within their 12-month programme.
What needs are your funds administration clients asking you to fulfil, given the operational and cost efficiency challenges they are currently facing?
And what trends are you seeing in the transfer agency space?
If you look at the way platforms, fund managers and fund accounting platforms all interact with transfer agents, there is a lot going on there.
Transfer agents provide the core system of record for unit holders in funds, and they have to deliver very high levels of service and operational resilience. They are also subject to significant cost pressures, and it is not unusual for TA services to be bundled as part of a larger custody or fund accounting offering. Sometimes, the economics of all that, and putting them together, can be challenging.
Our messaging software, Babel, sits next to TA systems and collects orders over various different networks, triaging them and routing them to the right system.
It essentially provides an extra layer of resilience for market interactions. In times of market volatility (as we experienced in March this year with over £1 trillion worth of transactions processed), being able to deal with all the extra trade flow that is generated is the exact software that clients are looking for. It is also good to consider distributed ledger technology in that space.
You could say that much of the trading side of the funds industry has been digitised, but not yet fully digitalised. There are still a lot of inefficiencies that come with the usage of old paper and fax systems that have actually been encoded into industry practice. There is definitely more scope for moving even further away from that in the future.
What has Bravura got planned for the remainder of the year and 2023?
We will be continuing on the acquisition trail, looking for assets we can leverage across the client base. The challenge is how we integrate companies in the right way and that we do not lose the cultural value that they bring, that is very important to us.
That is all part of a general, broader strategy of maturing the business into a company that has got a wide portfolio of products that we can deploy up and down the value chain.
As we see the value chain blur — with the new entrants at the low end, and advisors desiring to effectively run their own platforms — we are well-positioned for that convergence. Where superannuation (or workplace pensions in UK) is concerned, we have a very innovative solution called Sonata Alta, which is essentially the Sonata product, with a built-in set of business processes to give high levels of automation and straight-through processing.
We went live with the pilot earlier this month and we are extremely pleased with the project, which has been watched very closely in the Australian market, and we look to bring the same capabilities to the UK market very soon.
