This year, we at ISITC hosted our 23rd Annual March conference. Our yearly conference is a chance to bring together industry peers to discuss the main issues impacting the financial services world. This year’s program covered three main themes:
1. The current political landscape and its impact on financial services
2. Cyber-crime and security and the latest information on how we can best deal with bad actors
3. New technologies such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), blockchain, robotics and artificial intelligence
The program kicked off with a fitting start as our keynote CNN political analyst David Gergen addressed the audience. Throughout the sessions of the day, it became clear that the conference highlighted issues that the industry faces which we can’t directly control but others that we do have control of.
Politics and cyber-crime and security will be issues that continue to impact our businesses in ways that are largely outside of our direct control. Of course, each firm will put in place protection mechanisms and policies to keep their information and assets secure, but bad actors and politicians are always going to be around and their impact on our individual businesses is difficult to have a handle on.
However, technology seems to be different. As operational professionals, we can and do have a tremendous impact on the technology that our firms use on a day to day basis. Many individuals in the ISITC community are directly involved in these new technologies that may ultimately have transformational impacts on how our business is transacted. The promise of the elimination of reconciliation in a secure distributed ledger environment may still be several years away, but the building blocks are being designed today and it is within the industry’s power to make these changes.
We believe this gives us something to think about as we plan future informational sessions and recruit new members to ISITC. While we can’t directly control how politics will affect our industry, we can be leaders in how new technologies will impact our business and build best practices that will propel us to an exciting future.