The future of asset servicing

A huge wave of technology disruption is heading toward the asset servicing industry. In the next five years, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), blockchain and cognitive systems will drive dramatic change and have a profound, lasting impact on service providers’ operations.

These disruptive technologies collectively offer enormous potential for asset service providers to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and enhance the quality of service to clients.

In this report from Deloitte Global, we describe where we believe this impact will be felt most, and outline actions that asset service providers can take to ensure they can ride the technology disruption wave without being consumed under it.

Some benefits of disruptive technologies include:

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can automate high-volume repeat tasks such as trade processing, reconciliation, reporting, and tax so that human forces can refocus on more valuable and rewarding areas.
• Blockchain can significantly reduce the volume of paperwork involved in asset servicing, and make the trading process more efficient and cost effective for the business, as well as to the client.
• Cognitive technology has huge transformational potential. Asset servicing providers can leverage analytics and cognitive computing to develop trade algorithms that make predictions based on historical data, and learn how to respond to changing markets.

We believe service providers will see further efficiency gains when RPA, blockchain and cognitive technology converge, and they will face a choice of what savings to pass on to clients, and what to retain as profit.

The report also illustrates use cases on how leading asset servicing providers are deploying disruptive technologies to transform their business.