SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Technology Provider of the Year—SIX

And while SIX, which also won the best data provider category, might not be as instantly recognizable compared to some past recipients of this award, one just has to dig a little and suddenly SIX is everywhere, especially in its European stronghold, most notably, Switzerland. 

This year is a big one for SIX: Not only has it collected the highest-profile category of this year’s awards, but it also has a new CEO, Jos Dijsselhof, who was on the cover of the June 2015 issue of Waters when he was CEO of Euronext. 

Now that he has been at the firm for just over five months, what changes has he introduced during that time? “When I joined, the board had already worked out the new strategic direction for SIX—we call it SIX 2020—and in good Swiss fashion, that is called a mandate,” explains Dijsselhof. “It is a strategic framework for the coming years until 2020, and part of that is refocusing our attention on our Swiss customer base, because I think we lost our way a little bit by focusing too much on expansion and diversification and not enough on taking care of our customers.” 

Dijsselhof explains that the firm also wanted to simplify and streamline its structure and organize itself in such a way that it could benefit from having its entire value chain under single management. “And finally, we are keen to focus on our key customer groups—the banks,” he says. 

Innovation occupies a central position in Dijsselhof’s and the firm’s 2020 strategy, to the extent that it has created an innovation and digital unit within which the firm’s resources that have an innovation remit are housed. SIX has also doubled the unit’s budget and provided it with a CHF50 million ($50 million) venture capital fund to invest in fintech opportunities. “We are not just a company that provides infrastructure, services and utilities and runs things really well with high availability and with high quality,” he says. “We also help Swiss finance firms and international firms to innovate, reshape and restructure, and ensure that the banks in this country can stay competitive and healthy.” 

Past winners of this category include SunGard, now FIS, (2013), Markit (2014), Bloomberg (2015), SmartStream (2016), and IHS Markit (2017).