The way financial services firms communicate to regulators isn’t that far away from bicycle messengers and fax machines, according to Adam Ross, the new boss of Box for Financial Services, which is expected to open at the company’s new New York City offices this fall.
It’s a lot of emails, and PDFs going back and forth, and only as compliant as the people sending the messages. But Ross, who spent ten years as the vice president of global solutions at Nasdaq, where he help create work-flows that by their very design had to be compliant, has a different vision for the future.
“My desire is to see Box become the fabric of communication and collaboration, both internally and externally within the financial services industry,” he told me during a phone conversation last night. “By embedding Box within that workflow these types of entities will realize an enormous amount of productivity and efficiency gain.”
Ross’s first priority at Box (Nasdaq: BOX) is to understand what the company’s “FinServe footprint is today,” industry jargon for “financial services.” The second priority, he said, is to understand what “product enhancements” might be necessary to grow the business.
To do this, Ross says he’ll lean heavily on his personal network of contacts he’s build up from over 20 years in New York City’s financial services industry, long before there was even such a word as “FinTech,” along with analyzing how existing customers are using the product.
Box for Financial Services launched in February and has already been adopted by KKR & Co. L.P., Nationwide Insurance, AAA, and Encore Capital, according to the statement. Box NYC will service the entire northeastern region. The company isn't sharing numbers on how many total clients are based in New York City.
Ross started in financial services in the late 1990s when he worked as securities lawyer focused on capital markets compliance, and how software relates to regulation. “I always say software loves regulation,” he said. “Because of its ability to adapt to new rules and regulations faster than other product.”
Then, in January 2000, he moved to Bloomberg Financial to build an equity trading platform that would simplify compliance. He ended up spending about two years “skunk-working” the application, and about another three more years building it from zero customers to about 85 corporate clients, he said.
“I had a real successful run at Bloomberg,” he said, “But to be honest, I got completely burned out.”
During his time at building and growing the equity trading platform he was awarded a prize by Nasdaq for his compliance-as-software work and beginning September 2005 was invited to join the exchange and help it scale its own corporate solutions platform. A gig which eventually turned into a 10-year job.
Going forward Ross says Box, which currently has a market cap of $176 billion, will be able to “harness the metadata” of its clients, without being obtrusive. The end goal is to enable companies to be compliant with regulators as naturally as they go through their daily workflow, because appropriate regulatory considerations are built directly into that work.
“Historically speaking, financial services have been concerned with security and compliance. They still are today,” said Ross. “But they’re also at the forefront of adopting technology because they are concerned about these two things, and its these two things that are driving the need for Box to be such a critical partner in this evolution of the financial services ecosystem.”