How a Global Investment Management Firm Built a NextGen Portfolio Management Platform

01. Company

A global investment management firm was determined to undergo a digital transformation project to ensure that the best tools were always available to its portfolio managers (PMs). Key to the firm’s success has been its ability to operate at scale, running diverse investments through highly autonomous PMs underpinned with a commitment to constant evolution.

02. Challenge

The firm was determined to deliver on the promise of global scalability and control but without compromising the autonomy of its portfolio managers. They also wanted to allow new PMs to be productive as quickly as possible by giving them a desktop experience that was familiar and allowing them to use whatever applications they were accustomed to.

03. Vendor Evaluation

interop.io was selected because it provided the most sophisticated feature set combined with ease of configurability. This allowed users to benefit from a consistent workspace that blended in-house and third-party applications into a consistent whole. In addition, interop.io was able to show that its platform would scale globally and could be supported worldwide.

As part of the deployment, interop.io provided tracking metrics to see how users navigated between applications so as to improve application integration and suggest next best actions (NBAs) to improve productivity. This insight was extremely valuable to the stakeholders and users as it allowed it to develop best practices among its PMs and continually evolve its technology deployment.

04. Solution

The answer lay in decomposing its existing large-scale platforms into re-usable micro frontends. This provided the required levels of flexibility and agility but without compromising overall security, compliance and risk controls. In this way, the firm was able to “sweat” its existing technology assets but still move its users onto a completely new investment and trading paradigm – along with an entirely modern UX.

This approach also allowed new functionality to be rapidly created to meet new, evolving user demands and to meet the requirements of new PMs joining the firm. When a new app is created for a particular set of users it is tagged as “new” in the app store so other users can see if it might be relevant to them. This means that self-service has now become a reality at the investment firm and users never have unnecessary functionality imposed on them.

The platform was quickly rolled and is continuously enhanced to support more functionality. The program is now a cornerstone of the firm’s continued success and employee empowerment.

05. Future Plans

Moving forward, the team intends to continually develop new features and apps so that technology can always keep up with the evolving needs of the business. It will also take advantage of the larger open-source development community coordinated by FDC3 that manages interoperability messaging protocols.