Finbourne is collaborating with five financial institutions with over $2 trillion assets under management – including Fidelity International, HSBC Securities Services and Altana Wealth – to help design and refine the features of a shared cloud-based investment management platform that can replace existing in-house software and hardware. The names of the other two asset managers in the Design Council are currently undisclosed.
The participating firms span the full spectrum of the investment industry and include UK and international managers as well as custodians and a hedge fund, which meet to discuss how to rationalize infrastructure costs, achieve advanced standards of data handling and improve the quality of information for institutional clients, for examples.
Yugo Ashida, Director, Architecture, Fidelity International said in a statement: “Finbourne is building a platform from the ground-up based on collective experience which allows us to approach data challenges in a novel way. Being a member of the LUSID Design Council gives us the flexibility to test different technology, apply new thinking and put in place the foundations to reimagine our current architecture.”
Just recently, consultancy firm Oliver Wyman published its ‘Wholesale Banks and Asset Managers – Winning Under Pressure’ report which highlights many of the challenges we see facing the market. It sees a “strong case for ‘greenfield’ builds”. Under this approach, technology firms, working in partnership with asset managers, could launch a platform-based offering with a core data integration and orchestration layer, combined with a strong analytics environment, and an open application programming interface (API) front-end.