DST Global Solutions Hires Bob Leaper to Expand New Biz in North America

DST Global Solutions has hired Robert (Bob) Leaper, an industry leader in investment management technology, to spearhead new business development in North America..

Leaper, who brings 30 years of experience working for financial services and technology organizations, joins DST Global from Eagle Investment Systems, where he served as managing director and head of sales and marketing.

In his new role, Leaper will focus on growing the business for DST’s Anova suite of products for post-trade investment data management, performance measurement and client reporting.

The appointment of Leaper is a sign of its commitment to delivering exceptional data management and performance measurement solutions to its customers, according to Arun Sarwal, CEO of DST Global Solutions, in the release.

“Our focus is about data management and aggregating data and providing very flexible, analytical capabilities on top of that,” said Leaper In an interview this week.

In the same week that DST announced Leaper’s hiring, the company also released Version 3.0 of Anova, which had been in the works for a few years. According to Leaper, what’s powerful about this version of Anova is the evolution of the dashboard functionality to provide improved business information delivery out to end-users.

Leaper said DST is focusing the Anova product line on asset managers but also is targeting wealth management which cuts across private banking, brokerage as well as asset management.

The new release of Anova also has new reporting capabilities, which gets into client reporting to enable delivery of information in a PDF type of format.

“As firms are doing more with less resources, it’s important for them to have the right tools and platforms to be able to adapt to business changes quickly, without a heavy technology spend both for internal resources or consultants,” he said. Empowering the business user to create their own views quickly and easily fits in with this trend, he said.

With more sophisticated investment strategies, including derivatives and alternatives permeating the industry — for not just asset mangers but high-net-worth individuals — that complexity requires the ability to pull all the information into one spot, said Leaper.

“We’re really focused on the post-trade compliance aspect,” emphasized Leaper. Prior to joining DST,Leaper held leadership roles at several information technology firms serving the investment industry, including InvestTech Systems Consulting and Thomson Financial. At an earlier stage in his career he was a trader at Credit Lyonnais.

While firms typically have separate platforms that support the accounting for not only equity and fixed income but private equity and derivatives, Leaper said Anova is providing one platform to centralize that information and provide transparency an insight.”

In terms of transparency, an asset manager could look for issuer exposure across all these different asset classes, which could help them understand where those portfolios are in relation to benchmarks or where their asset allocation from a post-trade compliance standpoint.

“Regulations in the marketplace today are all about transparency whether LEI (Legal Entity Identifiers) Solvency II, FATCA, said Leaper, adding, “It’s important for organizations to be able to get at the information from multiple sources,” said Leaper.

As part of the dashboard, Anova offers monitoring alerts in real time that tell someone if the asset allocation reaches a different tolerance, or specific exposure to an individual issuer has deviated from guidelines. But also, there’s a number of advances in the dashboard for monitoring and exception management, he said.

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Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio