BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side newcomer (vendor or product)—Finbourne Technology

This category is perennially one of the more exciting to watch, as it offers a glimpse into the future. This year, it’s Finbourne touting the promise of tomorrow.

At the center of the vendor’s offering is Lusid, an open API-first investment platform geared toward the buy side. Lusid helps users to automate repetitive, non-value adding activities so they can focus on more complex investment strategies. It provides the ability to cut and view investment data in multiple ways, and allows for customization.

Thomas McHugh, Finbourne’s co-CEO, says asset owners want access to their own data to consolidate across managers and run their own analysis. With that heavy reliance on data to unearth insights previously not available, they also need the ability to process increasing amounts of data without having to bring in a flotilla of data scientists.

“Following significant investment, we launched Lusid,” McHugh says. “We’ve created software development kits in multiple programming languages, built hundreds of API end-points and had millions of API calls. We’ve been busy gathering feedback, understanding usage and really getting our heads around how customers are using our APIs and functionality.”

Over the summer, the vendor opened its Early Access Program, which comes with Exchange Data International (EDI) market data integrated as part of a free 90-day trial. This allows users to test and evaluate Lusid without the need to source, license, load and operate data feeds for static security data, prices and corporate actions. The platform enables clients to pull in data from multiple sources, get a single view of their positions, identify discrepancies and investigate differences in their data, and analyze their holdings by factors like trading strategy. “Because of our API-first approach, the system can also be quickly adopted by developers in their language of choice and, of course, deliver value immediately,” McHugh says.