Technology Landscape
Most technology platforms deployed in the Investment Management industry today fall in to one of the following categories:
First Generation Systems “Transactional”
Legacy accounting and transaction processing systems were sold and deployed in the eighties and early nineties. Used in many larger financial institutions or organisations providing third party administration functions they are highly scalable and extremely good at transaction processing. They work well within the bounds of their specific functional capacity however, they are extremely expensive to deploy and maintain, on old technology, inflexible, cumbersome and have very little capability in important areas such as client relationship management, modelling, analytics and reporting.
Second Generation Systems “Decision Support”
Reporting and Decision Support systems began to be deployed in the late 1990’s. Mostly built on Windows platforms they were developed principally to overlay or ‘sit on top’ of the first generation transaction systems. Much more user friendly and flexible they offered and continue to offer organisations the ability to integrate data from legacy systems, internal systems, spreadsheets, custodians, third party providers and so on. They provide effective drill down and data manipulation, charting, graphing, reporting and various degrees of performance reporting and order generation.
There are a number of key challenges that have arisen from the deployment of these systems and, quite simply, the market requirements have and are changing. Principally the requirements of the UHNW and HNW individuals are stretching the boundaries of the original specifications and delivering the required functionality is becoming beyond the reach of these technologies....The Challenge