BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side IBOR platform—Matrix IDM

A decade ago, it was impossible to come away from any buy-side-focused event without first being bombarded by vendors, consultants and analysts about the investment management industry’s utopia: the investment book of record, or IBOR. Its premise was simple: to deliver reliable, accurate and transparent position data—ideally on an intraday basis—to portfolio managers so that they could make the most judicious investment decisions. Everywhere you turned, there was IBOR. But after a few years, everything went quiet and the industry’s fixation moved on to the new darling technology of the industry: blockchain. Nothing happened to IBOR other than the industry’s spotlight moving on. It is still as pertinent as ever to an industry where the quality of investment decisions trump every other business process. Essentially, the challenge around creating an IBOR is a data management one, an area that this year’s IBOR winner, Matrix IDM, knows a thing or two about, given its principals’ involvement in the Cadis business, now part of IHS Markit.      

According to Matrix IDM, its “unique” approach to data management has allowed it to create a “next generation IBOR platform” that supports the needs of both asset owners and fund managers. The Matrix IDM platform provides transparency across even the most complex portfolios, including illiquid assets, and supports all the core capabilities of an IBOR, including the flexible definition of position views and the extraction of position-level data. Its Rebalancer tool seamlessly captures events that impact positions, while data-quality rules, exception management workflows and dashboards enable users to measure and manage the quality of event and position data. It also supports and maintains reference data exclusive to IBOR by providing proxy definitions, asset allocations groupings, and look-through definitions. The platform’s Ownership modeler supports constituent look-throughs for funds, index positions and basket positions, in addition to the ability to aggregate and store analytics sourced from a variety of external systems. 

Matrix IDM also offers a library of ready-made adaptors to third-party accounting books of record (ABORs), providing connectivity to JP Morgan, Blackrock, Charles River, State Street and Cassini, among others.