As head of financial information, Marion Leslie leads SIX Group’s fastest-growing unit, on which much of the group’s ambitions depend. She told finews.com how her division is driving the company’s targets.

Marion Leslie makes clear why financial information is best placed to increase the group’s overall revenue by 20 to 25 percent in the next four to five years: «Data is the essence of all activity in financial markets. Data is the product. It is the expression of all financial activity, whether it's a transaction, a pension statement, whether it's a holder’s custody report, or a payment in a retail outlet, is all about the data,» she said.

The unit’s positioning within the SIX Group mirrors the rise in importance of financial data across the industry reflected in deals such as the London Stock Exchange’s $27 billion purchase of data provider Refinitiv, early last year, and S&P’s $44 billion acquisition of IHS Markit in 2020.

Financial Information «is the highest growth sector in financial markets,» she said.

SIX's Engine

Across SIX, Leslie sees the unit as «the engine across the group, which is able to effectively collect, manage, distribute, analyze the insights,» that the company already has.

Digitization, fueled by the pandemic, is an industry-wide priority, as shown by Raiffeisen which recently did away with outdated systems and is allocating 500 million Swiss francs to its digitization efforts to make processes, such as online mortgage applications, faster and more efficient.

As if to illustrate this point, «Digitization only works if you've got actual data to process, when it's analog, it all falls apart,» she said.

Every innovation in finance seems to underpin data’s position as the industry’s backbone: if you've got new investment types, such as exchange-traded funds, environmental social and governance (ESG) products, or digital assets, «they need to be coded, valued and connected,» she said.

Making Sense of Data

Connecting the data is key to making sense of it, which is also where the challenges lie.

While there has been «an explosion of data, with the volume, the variety, and the velocity of data having increased exponentially over recent years, without the ability to cross-reference that data, you can't create reliable insights and information on which you can make a decision,» Leslie said.

Part of linking and making data usable in this context is through its Application Programming Interface (API)-based open banking platform bLink, where SIX sees itself as an interconnecting hub, where third-party data providers use SIX as an intermediary to offer their data to banks.

«Our goal then is to provide that connectivity and access; it's not about owning everything. It's about making sure that the datasets are available in a consistent and normalized way,» she said.

Bloomberg & Co

One area SIX does want to own more of, is business with clients using data from Bloomberg and Refinitiv, as CEO Jos Dijsselhof has said in past interviews, stating that there is demand across the globe for stronger and better alternatives to products from the main two powerhouses.

Yet although with SIXiD, SIX also has a terminal with displays and visualizations, its specialty lies in the data feed service. Users can’t trade on the terminal, which is why SIX is less in head-on competition with data terminal vendors.

Leslie sees the trading function on terminals as generally becoming less important as the role of the terminal continues to change, «with trading going increasingly machine-driven and other functions becoming increasingly automated,» she said.

Assets at Disposal

SIX’s «default position is on the data feeds that power the machines, I think that's a really good place to be. That's where digitization and automation lead you. But I think the need to have visualization tools is key,» Leslie said.

Although ESG is not particularly structured at the moment, visualization tools are important for analysts working with ESG data on SIXiD, she said. With every company reporting on emissions using different metrics, this patchy nature is typical for any type of data collection at the start: «If you go back decades, you'll have seen the same issue with company annual reports and P&L statements before those were standardized,» Leslie said.

Last year’s acquisition of ESG software company Orenda, is unlikely to be SIX’s last in the ESG space, as «the group is open to acquisitions across any of the business units,» with the firm’s assets at its disposal, she said.

Long-term Objectives

The firm is also looking at the crypto and tokenized asset markets with the aim of creating SIX’s platform of data as well as continuing to invest in tax and regulatory services.

SIX has already begun collecting data to build crypto indices based on data from exchange-traded products with underlying digital assets, which are transacted on its regular exchange. When volume ramps up on its blockchain-based digital exchange SDX, launched last September, it will make use of incoming data in the same way.  

SIX’s private ownership structure where its main shareholders, including UBS and Credit Suisse, are also its customers «makes a difference to the way we think and operate,» as the company is not beholden to a quarterly earnings announcement.

«We have supportive shareholders, our owners are also our customers, which gives us an ability to invest and develop solutions for our customers for the long term», she said.

To assess how SIX is performing against its targets, Leslie will no doubt be looking at the data. 

 With additional reporting by Marco Babic