By Gloria Lio, Head of Enterprise Services at DTCC
For decades, operations were viewed as the engines that kept the financial services machine running—focused on accuracy, speed, and risk mitigation. While the work that happens within operations is critical, it’s often been viewed as a “behind the scenes” business area. This perception is changing.
New technologies like AI have given firms the opportunity to reimagine operations from top to bottom. By transforming processes and business models, operations can become the strategic center of a financial firm, driving business value, enabling new capabilities and shaping client experience.
Below, Gloria shares some considerations and recommendations for how firms can continue to support this transformation journey with operations departments across the industry.
What role can emerging technologies play in this transformation?
Technologies like AI and machine learning offer a strategic advantage, helping firms solve longstanding challenges in new and exciting ways. Instead of relying solely on automation or manual process redesign, teams will be able to leverage AI for predictive analytics and intelligent workflow routing. This will help them understand the health of their systems, and how their systems connect with the broader health of the industry. Importantly, they’ll be able to better anticipate client needs, trends, and emerging issues before they happen.
When adopting and implementing AI within operations, it’s critical to ensure that high-quality and clean data is underpinning your AI strategy. Firms need to make sure they are correctly modeling their data so that it’s easily discoverable and actionable.
As these technologies take hold, the role of the operations professional will continue to evolve. Tasks that once required hours of manual processing — like trade reconciliation or exception management — will be handled in seconds. The result is that the operations professional will have more time to focus on higher-value work: they can better become problem-solvers, data interpreters, and client advocates. As they are equipped with tools that enable real-time insights, they can make decisions faster and provide better support.
With greater insights at their fingertips, teams can more easily share those insights directly with clients.
Many aspects of financial operations still rely on manual processes. How does your team continue to digitize and automate?
As an industry, we have an opportunity to be more proactive in how we’re managing the day-to-day of our operations. To that end, digitizing processes is essential.
As DTCC continues digitizing and modernizing its tech stack, one of the notable projects we delivered recently was our new Client Onboarding Hub.
This was a complete transformation of the way we onboarded clients, which culminated in DTCC delivering an end-to-end digital experience. This helped us accelerate our onboarding cycle time by over 20% in some areas – and there’s more to come as we continue to mature these capabilities.
Of course, another major area of operational transformation in the digital realm continues to be blockchain and tokenization. As DTCC continues to advance the adoption of digital asset technology across the industry, we’re also encouraging operations professionals to consider how to integrate it effectively within their organizations. Crucially, the processes we build to support digital assets should be fully aligned with our core operations. Interoperability is key—not just across platforms, but also in how we empower our people to support these capabilities at scale.
How do people and culture play into this transformation?
The most important aspect of a transformation journey – and one that’s often overlooked – is the cultural shift that must accompany it. At DTCC, we’re focused on how our ways of working need to evolve. That’s why we’ve launched a network of “culture champions” within DTCC Enterprise Services to help lead and shape this change from within.
We’re empowering senior leaders from across Enterprise Services to take on this critical role. Through town halls, engaging communications and other change management activities, our culture champions serve to spotlight and recognize employees who exemplify the key behaviors and mindset that will be essential in the future.
The transformation of financial operations from a back-office function to a strategic value provider is well underway—and it’s being powered by more than just technology. It’s about reimagining how we work, and how we empower our people.
