A Reimagined TCO Formula for FMIs Migrating to Cloud
Technology continues to pace the evolution of markets. But for financial market infrastructures (FMIs), cloud transformation can be challenging to assess using a traditional total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) framework. In a new paper from Celent, commissioned by Nasdaq, a rethought TCO equation is argued for that captures the holistic costs of FMIs “standing still.”
Opportunity Costs Should Also Be Weighed in TCO Analysis
Capital markets are evolving, competitive and regulatory pressures are growing, and new business opportunities are becoming available. The common denominator among them is technology, and FMIs are looking at cloud to improve scalability, resilience, analytics and client experiences, among other areas.
As they consider next steps, FMIs should look beyond lift-and-shift approaches in favor of embracing a cloud operating model. The TCO calculation for this business transformation, however, can look expensive versus existing on-premises solutions. But the unique factors affecting FMIs require a more refined equation that accounts for opportunity costs of FMIs doing nothing while markets and members pass them by on their technology journeys.
Introducing a New Total Cost of Ownership Formula
Traditionally, TCO is often calculated using capital expenditures and operating expenditures—i.e., CAPEX + OPEX = TCO. This new formula adds a “Strategic Friction” multiplier to represent the business impact of maintaining the status quo—StrategicFriction X (CAPEX + OPEX) = TCO. Utilizing research from FMI leaders, Celent assigned each strategic drag factor a number that corresponded to its impact. A figure over 1 represents higher friction while less than 1 represents lower friction; a value of 1 indicates no impact. Some of these frictions include:
- Technical debt
- Inability to manage exploding data volumes and meet rapidly changing analytics needs
- Cost of decreased agility in responding to client requests
- Slow development cycles/time-to-market
- Restrictive innovation (especially with AI)
Q&A with TCO Research Author
Listen to Monica Summerville, Head of Capital Markets, Celent, explain more about cloud trends in the financial services space as she dives into the TCO research, the unique position of FMIs and the cost of maintaining the status quo bias.
Magnus Haglind, SVP, Marketplace Technology, NasdaqPeople struggle with the costs of legacy technology and that has not come through [in costs analysis around cloud]. Legacy infrastructure can be extremely high risk and costly, there are dependencies on key staff, lack of support for new regulation, etc. All of this requires modern thinking.