Sulaimani is heading Euroclear’s Innovation office, which offers an informal environment to enable and support innovation. He explains:
“In order to drive innovation culture at Euroclear, we have to engage and empower our people and execute the new ideas into viable solutions. To do that, we are bringing diverse people and skills together to ‘centers of excellence’ where we build our internal capabilities in constellations of external partners and our own talented people”.
One of the key elements of staying agile in the changing technological environment is intrapreneurship. This requires convincing colleagues that innovation is possible, building the skills and networks, and operating smartly with recognized methodology and processes, like Lean Startup and Agile.
Promoting cultural transformation
A vital element in engaging employees and giving them a sense of purpose and belonging is through events. They help to build on successes, connect communities across the organization, and shift from competing initiatives to support symbiotic movement towards concrete results.
Pedro Silva gave an example: a 24h hackathon, held in 2021 in Euroclear. In this digital event, 14 teams and over 120 people participated in trying out new technologies, practicing design-thinking technics for problem definition and solution ideation, and proving the value of their concept. It was a fun, social event, with senior management participation and different side activities involving families.
“A hackathon is a rapid way of delivering prototypes, and also a great place to experiment, learn and grow. By developing intrapreneurship in the organization and instilling a new mindset, we are changing the way in which our workforce used to work. This is just the beginning, and further development is ongoing to get the solutions production ready for clients. Furthermore, we need to ensure that the models we employ are repeatable, hence we are continuing with the hackathons next year”, Pedro Silva concludes.
Innovation culture
We as a market infrastructure view Fintech as an opportunity to increase efficiencies in the post-trade domain through greater collaboration and innovation, while unlocking mutual cost-savings. Under increasingly heavy regulatory and compliance roadmaps, we are challenged as to how to bring the advantages of new technology into a highly-regulated landscape whilst maintaining our systemically important FMI role as the reliable and trusted business partner. Collaboration is key. We, as a group, have embarked on a number of partnerships with Fintech startups aimed at better ways of working to increase efficiency and reduce cost and risk.
