How would you describe Helix in relation to other technology companies in the market?
Helix Financial Systems is uniquely positioned as a technology company in the market. We possess the qualities of a nimble and flexible small tech company but are owned and backed by a large well capitalised investment bank and primary dealer, Cantor Fitzgerald. This has given us both credibility and the capacity to hire and retain superior product development and customer service resources so that we can take a longer-term, strategic approach to growing our products and business.
Being owned by Cantor Fitzgerald has also afforded us the opportunity to gain the insights and learn from the most talented professionals on Wall Street, both in-house and available to us through Cantor’s vast customer network. This has translated directly into the development of advanced features and entirely new products with the guidance of market professionals beyond what’s available to our competitors. We also have the operational resources of Cantor at our disposal. This enables us to maintain our focus on developing the best products for our clients.
HelixRepo and HelixMBS are well known but tell us about HelixSL—how did this come about?
HelixSL, or Helix Stock Loan, was the next logical progression for us. Our HelixRepo product is an extremely robust global collateral management, margin/risk, profit and loss, and repo trading platform, primarily focused on the cash and non-cash fixed income securities markets. After years of client relationship building, and again being uniquely positioned within Cantor, we were able to identify the similarities and differences between repo and and stock loan. Even though they get to the same end goal, their paths can be vastly different. The differences are large enough that most of our clients manage completely separate groups to run repo and stock loan, with separate people managing the desks, potentially even at separate locations.
HelixSL comes with its own unique requirements specific to the stock loan industry. We contemplated building these features directly into HelixRepo but realised the similarities between the two worlds were not great enough to justify this. Building an all-in-one front end would result in an unacceptable degradation of the user experience. Our suspicions were confirmed when several clients, who were using vendor platforms designed to handle both repo and stock loan in a single application, told us this was not optimal.
This combined front-end decreased productivity, introduced unnecessary complexity and resulted in additional vendor costs. They felt the similarities would be better addressed in a summary level platform that looks across multiple business units and presents the shared data points at a higher level.
As a result, HelixSL was born. HelixSL is our stock loan front-end collateral management, margin/risk, profit and loss, and trade capture platform, primarily focused on the global stock loan and securities lending markets. HelixSL is unique because it can be deployed independently to perform traditional stock loan features or it can be integrated into a back end to enable communication with our HelixRepo platform where cross financing information is shared. We determined the similarities between repo and stock loan and integrated them into HelixSL and HelixRepo when necessary, while maintaining the unique pieces of each in separate client applications. This way our users are shielded from irrelevant information or functionality.
We provide a highly custom service to each trading unit while still marrying the high level financing, risk and collateral information in a shared back end that can be accessed by higher level users such as corporate treasury.
How will HelixSL be differentiated from other systems?
We differentiate ourselves by staying extremely relevant to our users and providing superior customer service. For example:
We will continue to develop our front-end platforms to meet the specific, unique requirements of our clients. We concentrate on providing the most efficient user experience while automating as many tasks as possible. We keep in constant contact with our users and leverage their feedback to ensure our products are meeting the relevant regulatory changes, adapting to new concepts, and enabling new ways of trading that drive their profitability.
Customer service is something that we take tremendous pride in at Helix. It is the cornerstone of our corporate philosophy and we strongly believe is a distinguishing benefit that comes alongside our products. Going the extra mile and doing whatever is necessary to help our clients is deeply ingrained in our DNA and is something we happily provide as part of a long-term relationship with our customers.
Our ability to develop customised solutions to meet our client’s needs across trading, collateral and cash management, counterparty risk/margin and profit and loss.
How flexible is HelixSL in offering a scalable solution from large multi-billion dollar stock loan and repo desks down to the needs of a single department?
We have a two-part approach that allows us to offer solutions from the small start-up all the way up to the largest, global securities lending businesses.
First, we offer a set of products that allow clients to select ‘modules’ for their specific business so users are not bogged down with irrelevant features that would only add unnecessary complexity and cost. Our products are built with the concept of multinational parent companies owning several separate legal entities that are made up of several different profit centres. Each area has different users enabled with different sets of permissions depending on their responsibilities. Helix was designed to be configurable, allowing our clients to purchase only the modules they need, but with all modules integrated into a common back-end. This allows the system to be both scalable and flexible to clients of varying size and complexity.
Second is our pricing. We think we have developed a unique and flexible pricing model that allows us to provide our products and services to a wide variety of clients. We believe in growing with our customers and adapting our pricing to match the evolution and development of their business.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the industry?
Regulatory requirements are constantly changing and imposing new rules. As a result, there are additional costs all participants in the industry must consider. Companies must adopt or develop new tools, resources, and processes so they can become and remain compliant while at the same time attempting not to adversely affecting their profit margins. Trying to comprehend the full depth of these regulations and constantly keep pace with the latest requirements is a challenging endeavor, and this undertaking is further exacerbated given how overall profit margins have eroded in the industry in recent years.
What are the biggest challenges facing technology companies right now?
Existing legacy technology being used today keeps many companies feeling handcuffed. These legacy systems make it extremely difficult and costly to upgrade or switch to more cost-effective and innovative third-party solutions. Most bespoke platforms that companies use provide far less value than the cost they expend to maintain and support these ‘home-grown’ systems. The challenge for companies is to convince end users that it is worth the investment to replace these systems with third-party applications. Third-party vendors are in most cases more scalable, cheaper, and a better solution than their current solution.
Do you have any products or enhancements going live in the near future?
The next logical progression for Helix Financial Systems is a management dashboard that will aggregate relevant data across all business units. We already have the hooks in place within all of our specific products, HelixRepo, HelixMBS, and HelixSL, and will be able to easily, and in real-time, provide a dashboard that gives a cross business view of collateral, counterparty risk/margin, profit and loss, and cash management.
This cutting edge technology will be available to users on many different devices, not just your office PC. It will give the travelling professional everything they need to manage their firm’s risk and profit and loss from anywhere in the world.
← Previous interview
BNY Mellon
Robert Chiuch & John Templeton
Next interview →
Northern Trust
Andrew Clayton
Image: Shutterstock 