BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side newcomer (vendor or product)—Matrix IDM

Sydney, Australia-based Matrix IDM wins this year’s best newcomer (vendor of product) category in the BST Awards, thanks to its cloud-based Rebalancer offering, designed to provide users with transparency across even the most complex portfolios, eliminating their reliance on spreadsheets and allowing them to keep their exposures in line with their investment mandates and asset allocations. Rebalancer generates derivative trades to maintain asset allocations in line with investment mandates, taking into account the true exposures of underlying investments. It creates and manages cash-flow allocation algorithms, generates long-term (strategic) and short-term (dynamic) asset allocation targets, and manages synthetic overlays and instruction management of the derivative trades generated within the platform. 

This is the first year that the firm has entered these awards, but scratch a bit below the surface of Matrix IDM and you’ll find some old heads that have seen and done it all before. The firm has two co-CEOs—Neil Lotter and Stuart Plane—both of whom were involved in the establishment and success of Cadis. Initially known as Citadel Associates before rebranding to Cadis in 2007, the firm won the best buy-side data management platform category that year and then proceeded to dominate it for the next decade, maintaining its hegemony even after Markit (now IHS Markit) acquired Cadis back in 2012. A quick glance through this year’s list of winners reveals that IHS Markit is still dominating the data management category, thanks largely to the original Cadis platform. Clearly, the platform that Lotter and Plane helped create is more than just a bit special. 

This year’s three category wins for Matrix in these awards suggests that the success Cadis has enjoyed over the years is no fluke. Much of that success was down to the firm’s “no-obligation” proofs-of-concept, which had an impressive conversion rate, while perhaps more impressive is the fact that up to the point of its acquisition by IHS Markit, Cadis had the distinction of never having lost a client. Make no mistake, the buy side is going to hear a lot more from Matrix IDM and the folks behind this little gem.