want to spend time doing small-size orders of low value when there is technology available today that can take care of that. It is more interesting and stimulating for them to be free to focus on the areas where human capital has most value, whether that be executing more complex orders, developing sector expertise, or enhancing relationships with their portfolio managers or banking counterparts. Automation can genuinely lead to more interesting and enjoyable work thus supporting retention of employees.
Q. How does automation help firms achieve consistency in trade execution?
Before we implement automation, we ask a lot of questions so we can understand clients’ business processes around trade execution. This is necessary because automation essentially involves ‘codifying’ these processes into the machine. While undertaking this exercise with our clients we've increasingly found inconsistencies in how their trades are executed especially across large global asset managers that have desks across multiple locations. These disparities can result in excessive or unnecessary processes and tasks, which add costs to the firm and potentially risk their best execution policies. Automating a bad process doesn’t make it better, so this exercise helps clients to mentally step through their workflow, and in doing so we typically end up with a better, more industrialized process for their trade execution business which includes the capability to automate.