Meet the team: Nicolas Decouttere

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at REGnosys 

I started my career in capital markets as a financial engineer and throughout my career was always in product-focused roles. Seeking a departure from traditional finance, I started looking specifically at technology-enhanced solutions in AI and blockchain. This led me to set up my own consultancy firm to support financial institutions and technology platforms to leverage these new technologies for their own use cases. After working for 16 years in the financial derivatives markets, I was quite aware of the inefficiencies of the post-trade lifecycle process and challenges of regulatory reporting. REGnosys has a very compelling solution for this and therefore it was a natural fit to start working with the team. I am now supporting the delivery of REGnosys’ SaaS platform, Rosetta, to financial institutions to enable them to benefit from a standardised data model and process automatisation. Making sure the technology solution caters to the user’s needs across technology integration, features, deployment strategy and information security is central to my role. 

What is a cool project that you’re working on now? 

I am currently supporting a blockchain project which is developing a lifecycle event management platform for voluntary carbon credit (VCC). The VCC sector can benefit from blockchain technology in many ways: by ensuring disintermediation of carbon removal projects and delivering more transparency and trust in the quality of these projects. The project leverages the CDM to fill the functional gap between legal contract formation and trade execution. The project also harnesses the capabilities of Rosetta in many ways, but mainly to transform data input into a CDM compliant object via a feature called Rosetta Translate.  

How has technology in the financial industry evolved in the last 5 years and what are the next trends? 

Financial institutions have started transforming into data management enterprises, realising the value of the data they own and generate during day-to-day activities. In addition, firms are implementing robust frameworks aimed at delivering a better data strategy built upon standardisation across market participants as well as internal activities and divisions. This puts the foundations in place for the implementation of technology such as AI.  

Another trend is the mutualisation of efforts and promotion of open-source initiatives, which are not seen as an antonym to competition but more as a catalyst for technological outperformance. 

Lastly, blockchain technology continues to see growing adoption as it offers the promise of a secure, decentralised and transparent framework which can bring efficiency and new business opportunities to financial institutions.