[ I N T E R V I E W
|
J O S
What have been your primary ob-
jectives since joining SIX and what
progress has been made towards
achieving those targets?
Jos Dijsselhof: My top priority
has been to execute on the new
mandate of the repositioning and
refocus of SIX, and to make things
happen that were included in that
mandate agreed with the board
and chairman. Following on from
that, the next priority was to make
sure we maintain our business as
usual and then drive a change in
focus, culture and the way SIX
engages both internally and with
external partners.
Within that mandate it was de-
cided that we would seek partner-
ship to sell our cards business, the
D I J S S E L H O F ]
We have put the former divisions
Swiss Exchange and Securities Ser-
vices together in one business unit.
This allows us to offer all services
associated with listing, trading, set-
tlement and custody of securities
from a single source. We have also
bundled all data business activi-
ties in the Financial Information
business unit and moved the index
business to that unit. Furthermore,
we created a new business unit,
Banking Services, on the back of
the card business sale, because we
still maintain clearing for Swiss
Francs, ATMs, debit cards process-
ing and similar processes
Then we also created a new
business unit called Innovation &
Digital. That’s where we took all of
“The core business of SIX will remain listing,
trading and post-trading, financial information
and banking services.”
former Division Payment Services,
to a bigger party, so that party
could take that business on togeth-
er with their existing business and
be a dominant player in Europe.
We started that process in January
and concluded, in terms of signing,
with Worldline in May and will
conclude in Q4 in terms of closing.
That was one of the big priorities,
to get the right partner selected
and then execute the signing and
negotiation of that transaction. We
are proud that we could find with
Worldline the perfect partner.
The core business of SIX
will remain listing, trading and
post-trading, financial information
and banking services. We have
streamlined these activities in
four business units: Securities &
Exchanges, Financial Information,
Banking Services and Innovation
& Digital.
84 // TheTrade // Winter 2018
the people within the organisation
that did anything with innovation,
put them all together into one unit,
doubled down in terms of budget,
give them CHF 50 million as a
venture investment fund to really
start driving innovation. I call that
“innovation on steroids”. This is
the best model to accelerate inno-
vation and to really wake up the
organisation and say: “We are not
in the business of optimising what
we do today, we are in the business
of creating future businesses.”
Of course, we need to optimise
what we do, but we need to drive
innovation through new business
models, ways of working, services
and products.
We’ve done that whole reor-
ganisation in the first couple of
months of 2018 and implemented
some changes on the executive
team. The second thing we did
was to change the engagement
model with our customers, be-
cause we had one model applying
to most of customers and we
have changed that into a more
tailor-made engagement model
with these customers, so that we
almost mirror on our side what the
customer is looking for. We have
also changed the pricing structure.
We had many different individual
pricing structures or exceptions to
the rule - almost so many excep-
tions that there was hardly any
rule - and we brought that back to
more standardised pricing models,
so everybody who does business
with us in our core businesses has
access to the same pricing model.
Of course, if you do more you pay
less per unit, but everybody has
access and the opportunity to use
the same pricing model.
Now we need to make sure that
we deepen what we do on each
individual business, so we have
examined what we are going to do,
where are we going to invest, in
which elements we think we see
the biggest opportunities and how
we can optimise that value chain,
as well as what other models we
can start to disrupt the business.
In that second vein, we started
SIX Digital Exchange initiatives.
Next to our normal business,
which we will optimise and further
enhance, we want to start almost
self-competing initiatives where
we create an exchange where cli-
ents can get digital or tokenised as-
sets on a regulated digital exchange
where you can make transactions,
do price formations, settlement,
clearing, change of ownerships
- the whole value chain - within
a split-second. We believe this is
a very viable model with a lot of
opportunities. We will run that in
parallel with our existing busi-
ness; at some point in time some