Welcome to the latest edition of At the Forefront: Fintech Conversations!
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In this episode, Forefront Head of Content Sam Belden is joined by Chris Hurley, Senior Vice President and Director of Institutional Sales at CAPIS, and Jeff Hooks, Senior Vice President of Relationship Management and Client Experience at STP Investment Services. CAPIS provides outsourced and supplemental trading services across global equities, fixed income and derivatives; STP offers technology-enabled investment operations, fund administration and compliance solutions. Together, they discuss why emerging managers are increasingly outsourcing execution and operations rather than building that infrastructure in-house.
The conversation opens with the forces pushing managers toward the outsourcing model: fee pressure, the operational demands of scaling a business, and the reality that allocators now expect a credible answer on infrastructure and contingency planning before committing assets. Jeff and Chris point to a recent Coalition Greenwich report describing outsourced trading as “shock absorption” for internal desks, noting that at least 15% of buy-side traders now supplement their desks with outsourced providers, and that even established firms face key-man risk that outsourcing can help mitigate.
From there, Jeff and Chris walk through how their firms’ own partnership took shape out of a shared client’s need for both execution and operational support, using it as a window into what a fully integrated outsourced setup looks like when the two sides work in lockstep rather than as separate vendor relationships: STP anchoring the operational foundation (accounting, vendor connectivity, performance and reconciliation) while CAPIS handles execution once portfolio decisions are made.
They also get into the human side of outsourcing decisions: why managers hesitate, what it takes to earn their confidence, and how framing the conversation around growth rather than cost tends to move outsourcing discussions forward. The episode closes on a forward-looking note, touching on STP’s Launch Advisor product for managers looking to launch a fund, growing interest in co-mingled investment vehicles, and the growing role AI is likely to play in streamlining the manual, bespoke operational work that still eats up managers’ time today.
For more conversations with fintech and capital markets leaders, explore the At the Forefront podcast archive or our YouTube channel.
To learn more about CAPIS, visit capis.com. To learn more about STP Investment Services, visit stpis.com.
TLDR
0:45 – Why emerging managers are turning to outsourced trading
6:45 – How the CAPIS-STP partnership came together
19:30 – Common manager hesitations about outsourcing and how CAPIS and STP address them
27:00 – What’s next: STP Launch Advisor, co-mingled funds, and AI