High Line Advisors
Strategic advisory · New York

A management consulting firm specializing in strategy.

We have served financial services and technology companies since 2009, both directly and as an advisor to McKinsey & Company. Our clients have included banks, broker-dealers, exchange groups, investment managers, data and information companies, fintech and AI start-ups.

We help senior executives at large public companies formulate business strategy across banking, capital markets, investment and wealth management. The work encompasses multiple dimensions, including but not limited to competitive positioning, organization and governance, business portfolio mix and growth opportunities, product strategy, operating effectiveness, and risk management. We work with private ventures in an advisory or board capacity, and may invest as we go.

We've shared some of the public work as white papers and shorter insights.

The work
01 Institutional equities

Business model and coverage

Strategies for client coverage across multiple products; product mix and value proposition; risk management, organizational effectiveness.

02 Financing

Securities finance and prime brokerage

Collateral, repo, delta-one and the risks that pervade any business lending against securities.

03 Risk

Where the exposure actually sits

Unsecured credit exposure in financing transactions, and the practices that contain it before revenue targets override them.

04 Operations

Operating strategy

Streamlining the trade lifecycle, market structure change, and the technology decisions that follow from both.

More on the practice

Insights

Shorter than a paper: a reading of something that just happened, or an argument not yet worth twelve pages.

All insights

Publications

All publications
Financing Risks Revisited: A fresh look at best practices for securities finance and delta-one derivatives

More than three dozen best practices for banks and broker-dealers engaged in securities finance and delta-one derivatives — a roadmap to a robust business model, and a toolkit to diagnose existing practices.

2023 19 pp Panoramix Partners
Reinventing Equity Research as a Profit-Making Business

Research priced and managed as a business in its own right, rather than as a cost of distribution.

2017 27 pp McKinsey & Company
Beyond the Hype: Blockchains in capital markets

Where distributed ledgers change market structure, and where they do not.

2015 32 pp McKinsey & Company
Equities Content and Context: Comparative business models among banks and broker-dealers

What separates the economics of one equities franchise from another.

2012 16 pp McKinsey & Company