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Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York: Almost everywhere you turn these days there are articles about how FinTech will change the world, but ultimately, it will be up to the biggest asset managers to take the plunge and decide to change their business. Chicago-based Northern Trust, a $949 billion asset management and financial services company, thinks the potential for FinTech is significant, but it will still take some time before a lot of these technologies are ready for primetime.
"I think what you see throughout financial firms today is a lot of aging infrastructure. There is old accounting software, old hardware, processes that can be improved, but changing systems that are entrenched in firms of our size can take time," explains Dan Houlihan, senior vice president and head of global fund services at Northern Trust in an interview with Opalesque. "What we've opted to do is partner with technology companies and set up innovation labs around key business lines in order to test proof of value and work with emerging technologies."
According to Houlihan, while there has been significant growth in emerging technologies that can have valuable applications in financial services, implementation requires testing, training, and client education. Each step of that process takes time. In order to manage the research and development phase, Northern Trust has created a series of internal groups that are tasked with figuring out how best to implement new technologies.
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