AFTAs 2017: Best Third-Party Technology Vendor IT Team—Axioma

The platform development team focuses on internal functions to serve external user interfaces, and is responsible for data ingestion and analytics that are ultimately returned to clients in their preferred formats. The implementation team comprises business experts, many of whom hold chartered financial analyst and certified financial planner qualifications, with decades of experience in client interactions and system-onboarding processes. Amaury Dauge, COO and CFO at Axioma, says the company has built up a structure of decentralized, dedicated IT teams that remain close to its clients. “Decentralized teams within a consolidated structure facilitate better client support and collaboration; the product, engineering and platform development teams work closely together, and all report to the COO,” he says, while Fabien Couderc, Axioma’s CTO, oversees the day-to-day work. 

He adds that Axioma solutions are “highly sophisticated,” providing active risk management and portfolio construction expertise across multiple asset classes and investment strategies and, therefore, require client IT teams to remain close to the business. “Fortunately, we have built up dedicated teams within our IT department that maintain constant engagement with clients to ensure seamless platform development and implementation,” he says. Given that Axioma’s IT teams are crucial to its overall success and continued product demand, Axioma makes a concerted effort to attract as well as retain highly-skilled individuals. A majority of its employees across the firm have postgraduate qualifications, including more than 25 PhDs. 

The company continually enhances the optimization tools available for multi-asset class portfolios using its portfolio optimization technology. Dauge says Axioma is growing and expanding its product set, which also means the teams will grow with the business. “We’re always looking for ways to work smarter. For us as well, the challenge is to do more with less,” he says. 

In September last year, Axioma updated its Portfolio Optimizer in line with greater demand for services around taxes. It improved its tax-aware portfolio rebalancing, added multi-core optimization, and enhanced its web service and Python API. The enhancements were aimed at clients looking to cut optimization run times for multiple portfolios and to provide more tax information in reports.