12 December 2024
Likezero’s CEO, Michael Lines, shares the latest on our recent successes and future vision, from signing multiple GSIB clients and strengthening our position as a market leader to advancing our AI capabilities. In this Q&A, he highlights key achievements from 2024 and previews the exciting 2025 product roadmap that will drive Likezero’s growth and innovation forward.
This year has been transformative for us. We’ve established ourselves as the market leader in Capital Markets, supporting banks across all key market segments and geographies. On top of that, we’ve seen our clients expand their use of Likezero into new areas like Prime Brokerage, XVA and Netting.
Likezero have also broadened our data service offering into three distinct layers to meet evolving client needs:
The regulatory environment has been incredibly demanding this year, with heightened scrutiny around data transparency and quality. This stems from a series of high-profile failures—think Archegos and SVB—that have spotlighted weak risk management practices.
The looming Basel endgame and its implications for RWA calculations have added another layer of complexity, as has the breakdown in regulatory equivalence globally. In response, we’re seeing a shift in focus toward strengthening counterparty credit risk management processes, and we’ve positioned ourselves to help clients adapt effectively to these changes.
This year, we have significantly scaled up our data science team, driven by the need to move towards Smart Trading Agreements (STA). This shift will allow counterparties to amend contracts in real time, adjusting to market and risk conditions dynamically.
This innovation will be a game changer for our clients, equipping them with tools that not only improve operational efficiency but also align with emerging industry demands for agility and democratisation in contract management.
In 2025, our focus will be on two major initiatives:
1_ Developing an anonymised composite data set, enabling banks to “mark to market” critical terms in their legacy agreements. This will empower them to optimise those terms using STA, creating tangible value from their existing contracts.
2_ Building a fully automated onboarding process. This will dramatically reduce “time to trade,” which is crucial as asset managers seek new brokers and liquidity sources.
These developments will be transformative for our clients, enabling them to operate with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
We have always believed that relying on guesswork is not a credible approach for the banking industry, which is why our unique data mining and matching process has positioned us as a market leader.
AI is absolutely central to our vision and plays a crucial role in extracting and handling complex, variable data, driving the data services that underpin STA. I believe banks will move away from legacy contract lifecycle management workflows toward solutions like ours that treat contract amendment and origination as data-driven events.
This year, we’ve made significant investments not only in AI and data science but also in operations and client success. Ensuring that all our clients get the full value from our solution is a top priority for Likezero.
We now support 8 of the world’s largest banks, helping them achieve complete transparency in their counterparty relationships. And we’re on track to expand that number to 12 over the next 12 months. It’s been an incredible journey—our company size has been doubling every 9 months, and we see no signs of slowing down.
2024 has been a pivotal year for Likezero, with significant advancements in innovation and growth. As we move into 2025, our efforts will centre on leveraging AI, expanding data services, and improving onboarding processes to support our clients in addressing industry challenges.
