The Post Pandemic Reset blog series started with “digitisation in fund management”, which dealt with WHY fund managers should embrace digital transformation of processes and interfaces, both internally and externally. The second part “ HOW to digitalise fund management before the window of opportunity closes” described a pragmatic approach to implement low-risk digital transformation.
This blog will focus on WHAT to look for in a specialist digitalisation platform designed for front and middle office processes in fund management.
The platform must adapt to the fund manager’s environment. This means that the fund manager shouldn’t have to change either legacy processes or systems to fit the platform. This requires, among other things, the platform to have the following minimum characteristics:
Ability to support integration with legacy systems and future systems via flexible APIs.
Flexibility to incorporate workarounds where integration is not possible.
The ease of modifying the platform to accommodate current business processes and future changes.
Support the incorporation of an analytical engine without disrupting the manner in which analytics are handled by the business - for instance, there is no need to throw the Excel spreadsheet baby out with the manual process bathwater!
Security is paramount. While it goes without saying, it would be negligent to omit security as a critical component of evaluating any platform. This includes:
Platform or infrastructure security for applications hosted on the cloud or on-premise servers respectively.
Application security, including secure coding standards.
Data security, both at-rest, and in-transit.
Regulatory compliance, such as GDPR.
The platform should enhance the experience of both clients and associates of the fund managers (It should not merely digitalise existing manual processes), including:
Supporting real-time to near real-time analytics for portfolio construction, solution design, and valuation purposes
Facilitating customisation of experience by user type and individual user
Modern interfaces which can incorporate unique brand guidelines of different fund managers.
The platform should facilitate connections with a broader ecosystem with capability to:
Expose information to other platforms via configurable interfaces.
Read data from other public and private platforms in order to retrieve fund, security, index data, etc.
Upload/download data to/from other systems that do not support direct integration.
Choosing a platform is the critical first step in the digitalisation of front and middle office processes of fund management businesses. The next step is customising the platform to the unique requirements of the fund manager.
Leave it to the people at the coalface. The people in contact with clients. The people pitching against the competition to win new business and retain existing clients.
Let business units drive the customisation of the platform. They know their business and clients best. Empowering business units to customise the platform to their requirements will enhance their ownership of it and ultimately its effectiveness.
Customising a platform shouldn’t require IT or technical skills on the part of the fund manager. The platform provider should have a good understanding of fund management in addition to the obvious technical capabilities.
Adopt a modular approach rather than a big bang approach to digitalisation. It will be faster, less disruptive, lower risk, and lower cost. There are multiple processes and interfaces. While the goal is to digitalise all or most of them, it doesn’t need to be done at once. A modular approach will be less daunting and less disruptive to business units.
In the next installment of this blog series “Post Pandemic Rest”, I will share a brief case study of a successful digitalisation program on the EXcubed platform which has been undertaken by one of the largest fund managers in the UK.
The Blog is written by Shamindra Perera, founder of EXcubed and co-founder of WealthOS.
EXcubed is a specialist fintech product company that has developed, deployed, and operates a front and middle office digitalisation platform for fund managers.
The EXcubed platform is cloud native and modular in design. It is easy to customise and flexible in how it interfaces with internal and external systems. With plug-and-play features and components, it allows processes and interfaces to be digitalised quickly. Moreover, modifications and changes to workflows and interfaces can be accommodated easily and continuously. The EXcubed platform has been customised and white-labeled by one of the largest fund managers in the UK.