Julia Streets: Hello, I’m Julia Streets, the founder and CEO of Streets Consulting. I’m delighted to be joined by Somerset Pheasant, who is the Chief Strategy Officer of Droit. Somerset, how are you? You well?
Somerset Pheasant: Hi, Julia, very good thank you, and you?
Julia Streets: Yeah, really well, thank you. Thank you for joining me because I’m looking forward to this conversation because we’re going to explore a number of things. We’re going to think about client industry trends. We’re going to think about challenges, but we’re also going to explore reflections on 2025 and what’s coming up in 2026. So I’m looking forward to this. So let’s start with 2025. What stands out for you?
Somerset Pheasant: So I think a couple of things and they’re interrelated. And in fact, one goes back to a conversation you and I had at the start of 2025 around the concerns that the Trump presidency was going to bring in a bonfire of the regulations. So the repealing of laws left, right and center, which is going to cause volatility in the system. I think in practice, we haven’t seen that. The advance of regulation has continued broadly unchecked by those initial concerns. And we’ve seen the scope of the regulatory focus actually expand perhaps to some new areas. And we can touch on that in a bit. But particularly, we’ve seen interest in our pre-trade offering the expansion to those controls is really gathering pace. And then also the exchange traded derivatives space, particularly in light of the volatility at the start of 2025 and the tariff wars, which caused real spikes in volumes and evidence of issues around control frameworks in that space as well. So I think that the expansion of those scopes has really been evident and we haven’t seen that rolling back that people have been concerned with at the start.
Julia Streets: And I know how much time you spend as Chief Strategy Officer out in the field talking to clients. And it is quite a universe of clients just for the benefit of the audience. We’re talking more than 20 top tier banking and financial institutions.
So I’m really curious, what are they particularly thinking about? What are some of those trends at play?
Somerset Pheasant: So one of the big things we’ve seen is this concept of shift left, particularly among some of our more forward-looking clients. And really the thesis behind shift left is bringing the controls framework and the obligations further upstream to the point of execution and even to the point of client onboarding.
The reason being that if you have a centralisation of your obligations, a central view of your rules and requirements, that can help drive consistency and efficiency throughout the process. If you pick up issues at the end of the process downstream, it can take a long time to remediate them and it can be more expensive and more time consuming. If you can have that consistency of requirements right up top, it can help to get a smoother process through the flow, make quicker turnaround times and reduce the cost of actually remediating these things later on.
Julia Streets: And that’s real operating efficiency, that’s real cost saving, but also it’s all about confidence in being able to understand and remediate and also to anticipate as well. And when we think about the key milestones, you’ve been talking very much about the industry and about clients. What about for Droit. What are your key milestones in 2025?
Somerset Pheasant: I’d point to a couple of things. First, we’re delighted to have won our first client in Africa. It’s a big milestone for us and we feel really validates the global applicability of our offering. We’re very excited to continue to work with that client and expand our relationship with them and also to look to leverage that to gain a further foothold in the region. So that was a big win for us. I think beyond that, I’d point to our product expansion. We have seen increased focus from clients and interest from clients in a few areas. Pre-trade compliance is one big one. Regulatory focus is expanding there.
Clients want to make sure they have the right kind of controls at the point of execution and before to drive their obligations in that space. And then the exchange traded derivatives space where given the volatility seen at the start of 2025 and the spike in volumes, it’s really shown up some of the issues and limitations with the controls in those spaces and our offering suits well to that space and we’re looking forward to working to expand our offering with clients and to bring the control and the transparency to that area in particular. And then finally I mentioned position reporting. We’ve seen continued on that space as regulation looks to change and there are new regulations coming in next year in certain jurisdictions. Working with our partners in Endoxa and beyond to drive consensus and to try and resolve some of the ambiguity in those rules is a key area of focus as well and we look forward to continuing that work through 2026 and beyond.
Julia Streets: And consensus being the, it is the collaborative model where everybody comes together and literally figures out consensus.
Somerset Pheasant: Absolutely, bringing the idea of having multiple voices around the table, bringing people’s interpretation together and getting the best version of the truth in terms of how to comply with obligations, which in some instances can be quite ambiguous or nuanced, and actually driving requirements and how to achieve that operationally based on the best views of the market experts is a really powerful tool that we have.
Julia Streets: Yeah, I’ve had the privilege of chairing a number of your events both in the UK and in New York and I really would commend to the audience to participate and come to these events because it’s an incredibly powerful model and validated by so many in the industry who are stepping up and participating. Really fascinating. As we look ahead to 2026, Somerset, what are you focused on?
Somerset Pheasant: So one area which I think will continue to be a big focus is AI. It’s obviously a hot topic, remains one. And for us, it brings an interesting complexion to the question. At the core of what we offer to our clients is the ability to comply with their obligations with real confidence, with certainty, with transparency, predictability, and auditability. AIs and LLMs in particular have certain very strong attributes, but repeatability and confidence in answers is not one of their key points. So what we want to make sure we can do is to explain to our clients how we are using our core traditional methods to digitise regulation, to provide decision trees and decision logic that allows it to comply, but at each time with a traceable view back to the regulation and they can explain exactly what did it, whether it’s internal auditors or to regulators. However, AI does provide the opportunity to evidence some of these answers to access the content in more interesting ways. And so we’re looking to complement our existing suite of products with better explainability, better access for our clients to bring some of those points to life and allow clients to get better insights with as much of a detailed examination that they may have had to do before. So that’s a key topic we want to focus on as well.
Julia Streets: Another topic that everybody’s talking about is digital assets regulations. So can I take the opportunity to ask you what you think?
Somerset Pheasant: Absolutely. We’ve been monitoring it for some time through the various ups and downs of the cycles over the last few years. I think we’re entering an interesting phase right now as the US starts to legislate in earnest. From our perspective, in order to offer a product to our clients, we need a regulatory text to anchor upon. And I think as we get into this phase of actually legislative processes in the US that will apply to our client base in the institutional and wholesale markets, we will start to get to the stage where we can offer products to clients based on that regulation and allow them to apply the same concepts from traditional finance methods into the digital asset space, so providing the traceability, the predictability, and the compliance of their obligations in what is going to be an interesting new space for all involved.
Julia Streets: And so there, of course, we think about the conversation about meaningful value of the Trad Fi versus De Fi bridge, is really interesting. We’ll be watching that for sure. I think that’s going to be really fascinating as that continues to evolve. As we look ahead to 2026, what’s on Droit’s roadmap?
Somerset Pheasant: There’s a few things I’d say. First, we’re very much looking forward to continuing our client expansion. We’ve recently been joined by Jean-Marie, who’s going to lead our efforts in continental Europe. And one of our focuses is to expand our base there and bring our product offering to the buy side and sell side alike in that region. Beyond that, would say that product enhancement and growth is going to remain a key focus. As I’ve said, the regulatory scope is going to increase and continues to increase and will encompass areas like pre-trade and ETD and position reporting. We’ll continue to expand our offerings and add features to those product sets across the board. Beyond that, we’re going to continue to focus on our partnerships. We have one with KOR and one with Finbourne. They both give us leverage and options to access new markets and new client bases. So we’ll continue to work very closely with them. And then beyond that, I’d say we’ve got opportunity to work very closely with some industry bodies that we’ve joined recently so the Investment Association, the FIA, IMAS in Singapore and the FMSB that’s been very focused on the pre-trade compliance space so we look forward to continuing partner with them as well in 2026 and beyond.
Julia Streets: So there we’re talking about international expansion, we’re talking about product expansion, and we’re talking about industry collaboration. Thank you for taking the time to reflect on 2025, look ahead to 2026. It’s always a joy to see you. Thanks for joining me.
Somerset Pheasant: Thanks Julia. Thank you for having me.
