BST Awards 2020: Best implementation at a buy-side firm—FIS

For buy-side tech vendors, winning over the trust—and pockets—of asset managers is a race with no finish line. As such, a new victor has emerged in this category, which no company has won twice in a row since 2015. Last year, Numerix took home the title, while in 2018, it was split between RIMES Technologies and FlexTrade. This year, it’s FIS’s turn.

With a deadline of January 1, 2020, FIS completed the first phase of a complex implementation at a trillion-dollar asset manager in nine months, on time and budget.

In addition to integrating components of the FIS Investment Operations Suite—treasury management, investment accounting, reconciliation and digital reporting functions—the vendor created a new integration between the accounting solution and the client’s general ledger.

The process resulted in the reductions of 22 control deficiencies and 141 hours of manual activity monthly, as well as automatic implementations of compliance investment thresholds, trade capture, integrations, reconciliation, and reporting.

The investment manager is now looking to introduce more FIS solutions into its corporate treasury ecosystem, particularly the FIS insurance investment accounting system.

Looking ahead, FIS plans to evolve its hosting strategy by developing hybrid options with major cloud providers, which reflects clients’ needs to comply with changing data regulations. The Investment Operations Suite will soon cover new functions such as regulatory reporting and see increased integration with more third-party trade processing systems and established FIS systems such as its security master solution.