Big ideas aren’t necessarily bad ideas. But they are often ignored, shouted down or laughed off and few ever come to fruition.
They are, nevertheless, an important catalyst for creativity and innovation. Fortunately, the pipeline for big ideas in the financial services industry remains wide open.

Industries can easily stagnate when there are no fresh viewpoints and, luckily, there are people in the financial services industry who are thinking big — about issues such as the markets, corporate governance and the future role of regulators.

Bill Cara, a securities industry veteran, maintains a Web log, or blog, (www.billcara.com) from which he frequently weighs in on market events and issues.
Among his treatises on stocks, commodities and run-of-the-mill market issues, Cara also occasionally rails against the industry establishment. He complains that the system is rife with inherent conflicts of interest that tend to be exploited to the detriment of small investors, and to the benefit of powerful players.

He’s particularly scathing about the sell-side of the industry, where he once worked. Cara is most troubled by the inherent conflicts that can hurt clients — such as brokerage firms exploiting their knowledge of client orders to make principal trades against the client. “In no other facet of society does such a blatant conflict of interest exist,” he writes. “Time after time, there are reports of client abuse, which are systemic, but nothing is done to change the system.

“It would be laughable, for instance, if lawyers from the same firm were allowed to represent opposing litigants and use their knowledge of the clients against them, and have other partners in the same law firm sit in judgment of client complaints,” he maintains.

Cara imagines fixing the system from the ground up by restructuring it to eliminate the sort of built-in conflicts that can end up harming investors. Essentially, he argues, the capital markets part of the business needs to be separated from the financial services end, with the two sides regulated by different legislation.

Financial advisors and planners would still provide essential services, but, Cara argues, there’s no good reason for the capital markets to be linked to the financial services side. He foresees a day when the owners of capital will trade with one another electronically, without much intrusion from intermediaries. “We should all just send our financial assets to an independent depository offshore, trade when and where we like, and settle trades instantly against the depository,” he says. “Most of our problems would disappear.”

National markets could list and trade issuers headquartered in their countries.
Trading would be electronic, offering full transparency of the order book and trades would be cleared and settled with straight-through processing. By taking the human element out of the trading side as much as possible, he says, the source of conflicts can be eradicated. By rigorously separating the various parts of the industry along functional lines, he says, most other conflicts could be eliminated, as well.

“The owner of capital has to be 100% separate from those who are the service providers and sales vendors. The credit end of the industry has to be totally separate from the debit end. Unencumbered capital must be allowed to be 100% free of involvement by the credit system and the sell side,” he says. “Digital technology exists today to facilitate such a free capital market system.”

The technology may exist, but there are innumerable practical obstacles that ensure that much of his vision will never materialize.
Even Cara is not optimistic — there are far too many powerful, entrenched interests opposed to such radical restructuring.

Nevertheless, his ideas do suggest some interesting ways to reform the system.
Concepts such as divorcing financial services and financial advice from the capital market and enforcing business divisions to prevent conflicts deserve greater consideration.

It is also conceivable that a direct access, all-electronic trading system could transform capital trading the way services such as Google and eBay have transformed the way people gather information and shop. Online trading markets have emerged to allow punters to lay down bets on everything from sports to the identity of the next pope. Could securities do the same?

One big difference is that a vast legal and regulatory bureaucracy controls the flow of information to the trading public. However, the quality of the information flow has been partially discredited in recent years through a succession of corporate accounting scandals.