Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Paul Calderone, Chief Operating Officer at Hazeltree.

“The core premise of Hazeltree is really around managing complexity. And we kind of go on this ‘aggregate, optimize, execute’ concept.”

“So even post crisis, you had some of the larger hedge funds still maintaining technology operations, investing into IT and technology in-house. And that is kind of a sea change over the years where they’ve outsourced more and more of these functions, especially in the middle office to providers like us, in some cases, with heavy collateral management.”

“The more complexity that’s come into the system – multi-prime, multi-bank, multi-counterparty – the harder it is to really dial that in and zero in on what’s my true usable, free cash today right now.”

“Very often you find that you’re over pledged to your counterparties in the derivatives world. So it’s an ability to free up that collateral and bring it back, as well as dispute calls that you may be receiving from your counterparties.”

“What I’ve seen is some clients come at [treasury management] from more of an accounting orientation, rather than a true finance orientation. So we think there’s true alpha here. We think there’s money to be saved, there’s money to be made in the middle office.”

“As often as you can, you want to be watching the health of those counterparties. Luckily, this time around, we haven’t seen banks be in crisis. But last time, it was very much a crisis around banks. So that idea of being able to understand how much exposure you have to a given counterparty and then do something about it, potentially move your business away if you have to, is an important part.”

“You want to be able to [take actions] on mobile devices. And so we have recently come out with a mobile enabled app that’s out there now, publicly available for that part of the system. We will continue to do more of that over time – mobile device enabled solutions.”