BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side IBOR (investment book of record) platform—SimCorp

Overview

SimCorp’s multi-asset investment book of record (IBOR) is designed to provide buy-side firms with a single source of truth across the entire business featuring real-time data (positions, exposure, valuations and cash) across the full investment value chain allowing them to make the most judicious, repeatable and transparent investment and operational decisions. Large numbers of buy-side firms do not have access to real-time data and analytics given the number of disparate systems and processes across the business. This typically means they rely heavily on batch processing, which invariably leads to latency and manual errors.

The solution  

SimCorp sees an IBOR as a foundational dataset that all practitioners across the business should have access to no matter their role in the investment value chain. The firm’s IBOR provides real-time total portfolio views for the investment team, the basis for risk and performance for investment monitoring teams, and the core source of data for investment operations and accounting. It is natively multi asset and lifecycle-based, supporting the creation of an integrated office for optimal business and investment decisions.

Secret sauce  

SimCorp’s IBOR covers all financial instruments across the full investment lifecycle. All data is centralized in a single, integrated platform underpinned by a single database. This allows immediate insights into valuations for current positions across both public and private market assets, risk, performance, cash, and key compliance checks, all of which are critical to make the most informed business and investment decisions at speed and scale.

Recent milestones

SimCorp integrated risk analytics and portfolio construction functionality with its investment management platform, all on top of its IBOR data. This resulted from its merger with Axioma in 2023. SimCorp also unveiled a new cloud-native performance attribution solution as part of its Investment Analytics Platform, developed to support real-time performance analytics.

Future objectives

SimCorp will deliver a new user interface integrating Microsoft Copilot, providing generative AI access to its IBOR. The goal is to enhance and accelerate decision-making across the entire investment value chain with real-time, quality data. Copilot, integrated into the SimCorp’s current workflows, will be able to process datasets for real-time market and scenario analyses and simulations, complete with visual aids like graphs and charts.

Why they won

SimCorp is back to its winning ways in the Buy-Side Technology Awards in the category it featured prominently in for the best part of a decade going back to 2010. Readers will be familiar with SimCorp Dimension, now folded into the firm’s SimCorp One investment management platform, and Axioma, which joined the Deutsche Börse stable back in mid-2019. And while the firm’s IBOR has long been touted as one of the industry’s foremost all-singing all-dancing “single sources of the truth,” it really stands out from the crowd when viewed as a key component of the firm’s integrated front-to-back investment management suite. Many vendors might claim to do it all, but few (if any) can match SimCorp’s investment management expertise, pedigree and the breadth and depth of the functionality it offers the buy side.