Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Compliance Product—SIX

This is the second consecutive year that SIX has won the award for the best sell-side compliance product at the Sell-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its Sanctioned Securities Monitoring Service. Oliver Bodmer, senior product manager at SIX, describes the firm’s offering as a cascade of files to help identify financial instruments connected with sanctions. He lists a number of criteria that he believes make SIX’s offering stand out from its competitors. “In our files, you will find the link to the executive order or to the European Union ordinance number [explaining] why a security is sanctioned on the security level, for instance. The file is normalized so that you can compare between different regulators,” he says. 

SIX also allows users to link securities back to institutions that are sanctioned in a second file, as well as to sanctioned individuals. “We also deliver a third file—the structured products file—which the competition isn’t doing,” Bodmer explains. “This means that whenever an instrument shows up on the instrument file that is connected to a directly sanctioned issuer, we also look through all structured products.” 

By doing this, SIX not only provides clients with the security directly connected to the issues, but it also resolves the residual risk that a structured product issued by a non-sanctioned issuer might be tracking a sanctioned security. 

Last year, SIX also launched a service to identify securities linked to marijuana-related businesses. “The more we sell the product, the more the issuers start to adjust their behavior—they are issuing fewer structured products tracking marijuana-related instruments, because they do not want to have exposure to such businesses,” he says. 

Bodmer says sanctions and blockchain were the number one topics for the financial sector last year. “With the global pandemic we are facing, I would say world leaders are now occupied with dealing with the Covid-19 situation, whereas in 2019 they were pretty much occupied with issuing new sanctions,” he says. 

Bodmer believes that with the anticipated global recession, sanctions could once again become an important topic of discussion. “This is my personal prediction, but I think that sanctions will again become important, due to the fact that they are a part of foreign policy, and world leaders are trying their best to move out of that recession,” he says.