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Reflecting on 2024: A Year of Innovation, Growth, and Resilience

Written by Admin | 12-Dec-2024 10:32:35

As 2024 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible journey we’ve shared with you this year. From milestones achieved to challenges overcome, this year has reinforced our commitment to innovation, collaboration, and delivering exceptional value to our customers and partners.

 

2024 Highlights: Celebrating Our Achievements

This year, we reached significant milestones that we are proud to share:

Product Innovation: As well as incorporating behind-the-scenes processing improvements, we successfully launched a number of new features, enabling clients to achieve huge efficiency gains in their IPV processes across all asset classes.

  • Outlier Finder – quickly identify points that are excluded or outside a customisable threshold.
  • Problem List – keep track of recurring pricing issues or big value positions.
  • Back-Testing – quantify IPV data versus consensus and transaction data.
  • Transaction Data Reporting – visualise liquidity, observability, and bid/ask analyses.

Transaction Data: We have extended our Partner list with the incorporation of transaction data from Fenics Market Data and Tradition Data into our overlays and Back-Testing functionalities.

Customer Success: We are thrilled to have on-boarded 5 new clients this year, helping them achieve greater transparency to their IPV processes and datasets. Each new addition gives greater depth and colour to the information provided in our consensus pricing.

Team Growth: We welcomed Olivier Namet to the team as Quality Assurance and Delivery Manager. Olivier’s impact has already been felt as internal processes have been improved allowing enhancements to be released on a more regular basis.

These accomplishments would not have been possible without the dedication of our team, the trust of our clients, and the support of our partners.

 

Growing Asset Classes

Each of our asset classes has been expanded based on client demand to offer greater instrument coverage.

Equities
  • 25 Delta price and volatility instruments added to Options (EQ102)
  • Implied basket correlations
  • Total Return Futures
  • Autocallables
  • Multiplicative cliquets
Macro
  • ECB meeting date swaps
  • Increased granularity to yield curves including IMM dates
Commodities
  • 25 Delta price and volatility instruments added to Options (CM103)
  • APAC (Australia and Japan) power forwards
  • Hourly Power Shaping

 

Skylight in Action

Skylight are proud to be a pro-active member of the IPV ecosystem. As well as having regular formal dialogues with our clients, we host networking events that are always enthusiastically attended.  There has been Polo at the Hurlingham Club, various cricket matches and networking events across London and New York.

We have been developing our blog with articles appropriate and relevant to IPV. Most recently we collated and published the responses to the EBA Draft RTS.  We hope these are insightful and always welcome feedback and suggestions for new articles.

Maybe this is why Risk magazine chose to profile us in May 2024 - https://www.risk.net/markets/7959455/skylight-finds-an-opening-in-consensus-pricing.

And we were overwhelmed with the support we received for our Everest challenge in March 2024.  We set ourselves the target of climbing (virtually) the equivalent of 8,849 metres using the internal stairways of our office building.  Spearheaded by our CRO James Ritchie we eventually achieved a height of 15,751 metres, more than the height of Ascraeus Mons on Mars, and raised over £3,400 for Brain Tumour Research.

 

Key lessons we’ve learned

Collaboration Fuels Innovation: By fostering closer partnerships with our clients, we co-created solutions that have delivered even greater value.

Agility Drives Success: Our ability to pivot quickly allowed us to stay ahead of industry trends and meet evolving customer needs.

Focus on Expertise: Employing the correct expertise, through product, infrastructure and development, minimises risks while building trust with our clients.

 

Final Word from our CEO, Adam McIlroy

“Skylight closed the year on a real high.  The demand for a cost effective, highly responsive IPV service that can shake up the status quo has never been more in demand.

We have had strong growth across all asset classes, with particularly stand out performances in Commodity and Equity Derivatives.  Both services have added serious depth to the contributor lists and broad increases in coverage.

Interest rates and FX are very well regarded across the street and continue to offer serious value for money to new joiners, while our exotic and structured product services continue to receive great feedback.

We were privileged to be able to host a working group of leading investment banks to discuss the development of reporting and back-testing functionalities to provide information that IPV teams crave in today’s robust and challenging regulatory environment.  We would like to thank all those who lent their time and expertise to the group.

As we exit 2024, we have made great strides to truly being able to say that we are a complete replacement service that offers so much more.

What’s next for 2025?  We have great plans and don’t want to give too much away.  All I can say it will, as always, involve great levels of cooperation with our clients and dedication from the Skylight team.”

 

Thank You

We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our customers, partners, and employees.  Your trust, collaboration, and support have made 2024 a year to remember.  Together, we have accomplished so much, and together, we will continue to advance IPV.

Here’s to a bright and prosperous 2025!

 

The Skylight Team