@Pixabay.
Fund managers face ongoing dilemmas when choosing the right order management systems (OMS) to support areas of the business including accounting and trading processes.
Many factors need to be balanced, from the desire to keep certain knowledge in-house versus the power of outsourced solutions to the contradiction between a need to leverage technological innovations such as artificial intelligence and the problems presented by poor-quality data.
Recently Clear Path Analysis held a roundtable in partnership with SS&C Advent featuring a range of investors to understand the greatest challenges today, and how firms are leveraging technology to overcome those problems and innovate.
Many of the panellists felt that a key obstacle was that there was the lack of a one-size-fits-all solution, which left asset owners struggling to stitch together disparate technology platforms. This, in turn, causes headaches for everything from reporting to automation.
The discussions now form the basis of the “Meeting the operational challenges of growth and multi-asset class management”, that includes nearly a dozen top investment professionals giving their candid views on the challenges faced by practitioners working for third-party managers, insurers, and/or retirement funds.
You can read an extract from the executive summary of the report below.
The participants at the roundtable reiterated that it was hard enough to get one coherent operating system in one location, but for international companies the challenges were even more complex.
Most of the panellists agreed that one of the biggest challenges to accessing automation and technology was poor data, and that trying to improve this is a top priority. Part of the data complexity for bank loans includes a lack of standardisation in agent bank documentation and investor notifications and a lack of automation in accounting. For example, many companies are still managing data that lives in non-digital PDFs.
The other crucial piece of the puzzle is getting the right people in place. For Frick, critical thinking is the most important skill to have in your teams.
