Asia Awards 2025: Best IBOR platform—SimCorp

Overview

SimCorp’s multi-asset investment book of record (IBOR) provides a single source of truth across the entire investment lifecycle with real-time data (positions, exposure, valuations and cash) accessible to all stakeholders. In today’s complex market environment with significant private market allocations and market volatility, large numbers of buy-side firms continue to struggle with fragmented/legacy systems and batch processes, which can create latency and errors. SimCorp’s IBOR is designed to eliminate those challenges by providing immediate insights to support faster, more informed investment decisions.

The solution  

SimCorp’s IBOR is the foundational dataset powering the firm’s front-to-back investment management platform. It provides portfolio managers with real-time total portfolio views across all assets—public and private—enabling insights into positions, exposures and risks. This unified data ensures users get the right data, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it. Investment decisions, risk management, performance analytics and accounting processes are all supported by the firm’s IBOR.

Secret sauce  

SimCorp’s IBOR is a multi-asset platform that supports a range of assets/investment types, including public, private, alternative, derivatives and cash. With continuous processing, it is “always on” and up to date. This ensures there are no position batch integration issues and therefore no break in the value chain. All changes are visible immediately, providing consistency across the organization in terms of positions, exposures, real-time cash, valuations and analytics—essentially it is the single source of truth across all data views.

Recent milestones

• An October 2024 Forrester Total Economic Impact case study of SimCorp One, the firm’s integrated investment management platform, showed 134% ROI with 13-month payback, delivering improved operational efficiencies of 25–45% worth $11.5 million over three years.
• SimCorp’s 18-year partnership renewal with Deutsche Bank Securities Services demonstrates the platform’s ability to support complex, multi-market operations while meeting various regulatory requirements.
• Enhanced front-office capabilities by integrating advanced portfolio construction and risk analytics from Axioma directly into the IBOR platform

Future objectives

SimCorp is set to integrate Microsoft Copilot with its IBOR to enhance investment decision-making. This initiative will enable quick analysis of data for real-time market insights and scenario analyses, complete with visual aids. Portfolio managers will be able to instantly query positions, exposures and risks across all assets, leveraging natural language processing. IBOR data must be consistent and accessible to ensure reliable results.

Why they won

For portfolio managers and other front- and middle-office staff, having a real-time, accurate and reliable IBOR is akin to a traveler having a GPS when setting out on a journey—they need to know precisely where they are in the world if they want to reach their destination. 

SimCorp has been at the forefront of the development of the IBOR across the buy side for the best part of two decades now, but it is the real-time aspect of its current iteration that makes it genuinely transformational for its buy-side users. Add to that tight integration with SimCorp One, the firm’s all-singing, all-dancing front-to-back investment management platform, its broad asset class coverage, and its ability to slice and dice data to generate views for its various user types, and you have the makings of one of the buy side’s most compelling technology and data ecosystems.