AFTAs 2019: Best IT Integration Initiative—JP Morgan Asset Management

JP Morgan Asset Management takes the 2019 AFTA for the best IT integration initiative on the back of its recently launched investment service, You Invest Portfolios. The new offering, which was introduced in July 2019, taps into the asset manager’s robo-advisor service, allowing clients to buy managed portfolios based on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) without having to go through a financial advisor.

Implementing the service not only required building and integrating systems within JP Morgan Asset Management, but also integrating with the firm’s Wealth Management business in order to automate information flow. The latter is responsible for establishing portfolio guidelines and the implementation of portfolios for individual client accounts, while JP Morgan Asset Management is responsible for creating and managing the portfolios’ underlying asset allocation and ETF selection.

Manish Kumar, engineering manager for JP Morgan Asset Management ETF Technology, says he has seen an uptick in the market for micro-service adoption and public and private cloud adoption. He has also noticed an increase in demand to deliver faster and more reliable software with smaller teams.  

Kumar cites the example of a recent rollout involving integrating JP Morgan Alternative Asset Management’s advisory investment models into JP Morgan Wealth Management’s Private Bank in order to leverage You Invest Portfolios. “When we looked at the advisory workflow within asset management and other business units, what we found was that while portfolio management was streamlined, the majority of the downstream processing required manual interactions with multiple systems for advisory trade booking,” he says. “To solve for the manual interventions, we developed a number of supporting services and modules around our Portfolio Management application.”  

These additional services included dividend investment, order management, advisory client notification and a rebalancing service. Next year, the firm plans to enhance performance analytics and add risk and look-through capabilities to the platform.h