BST Awards 2025: Best buy-side data management product—Finbourne Technology

Overview

Finbourne Technology’s EDM+ is designed to address the critical challenge of fragmented data across investment management firms, where information comes from multiple internal and external systems, each with their own distinct formats. Traditional data warehouses create the “single source fallacy,” where all data is forced into a single, rigid format, leading to staleness, context loss and integration complexity. 

EDM+ eliminates those limitations through read–write, real-time data connections that preserve native formats, while simultaneously enabling unified access to data. This approach maintains data relationships, enables immediate updates and supports actionable workflows with full audit trails.

The solution  

EDM+ solves data fragmentation through real-time virtualization that connects systems without moving the data residing within them. Its API-first architecture provides over 700 standardized connections, enabling instant access to unified, mastered and quality-assured information. Bitemporal data storage preserves complete historical context, allowing time-travel queries to any moment. The platform’s data model adapts to complex financial structures, while fine-grained user entitlements ensure secure access. This eliminates costly reconciliation processes, reduces integration timelines by 75%, and enables AI-ready data foundations with built-in governance and auditability.

Secret sauce  

Finbourne sees its unique differentiator as a combination of real-time bidirectional data virtualization and embedded financial domain intelligence. Unlike generic data clouds, EDM+ is designed to understand investment workflows natively, supporting complex instruments and fund structures out of the box. The platform’s bitemporal architecture allows firms to reconstruct any point-in-time view with complete accuracy. Critically, it enables safe AI deployment through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols, making it the only platform purpose-built for compliant AI adoption across the financial services industry.

Recent milestones

Finbourne recently:

• Accelerated client adoption with 13 institutions going live during 2025, including tier-1 asset managers, global asset servicers, alternative asset managers, pension funds, private equity and private credit firms, demonstrating broad appeal across the buy side
• Launched AI-ready architecture featuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, enabling permission-aware AI agents to access live operational data and automate workflows while maintaining full compliance and auditability
• Enhanced EDM+ capabilities with expanded integrations marketplace roadmap and over 700 standardized APIs, reducing client integration complexity while enabling connectivity across the financial services ecosystem

Future objectives

Finbourne will focus on:

• Expanding its integration network to connect clients to the broader financial market ecosystem, enhancing connectivity across data sources and reducing implementation complexity for new connections
• Deploying automation management capabilities, thus removing human intervention through scheduled and event-driven workflows, with a graphical workflow designer eliminating the need for code-based workflow definition and enabling business users to create workflows independently
• Establishing data control and exception management evolving capabilities for a seamless experience across data quality, matching and merging, and reconciliations, providing unified handling of operational exceptions and data issues

Why they won

The best buy-side data management product category has traditionally been one of the most competitive and sought-after of all categories on offer in the annual BST Awards. The category was dominated by one firm―Cadis, now part of the S&P Global stable―for more than a decade. However, with its win in the corresponding data management categories of this year’s Waters Rankings and Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards, Finbourne has emphatically shown itself to be one of the go-to providers in this market.

Finbourne’s win comes on the back of its outstanding EDM+ platform, designed to—among other things—address the perennial issue of data fragmentation across buy-side firms, which it does via its real-time, read-write data virtualization model that unifies information across systems without forcing it into rigid structures. 

Its API-first design, featuring over 700 standardized integrations, provides instant, governed access to mastered data for buy-side personnel, while maintaining full lineage, auditability and security. The platform’s bitemporal architecture preserves historical context and supports time-travel queries, enabling transparency and analytical depth. By embedding financial domain intelligence and AI-ready protocols—Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) frameworks, for example—EDM+ supports buy-side firms in safely adopting compliant AI use-cases.

In winning this category and extending its recent successes across other WatersTechnology awards programs, London-based Finbourne is now unequivocally one of the industry’s leading lights. Who would bet against the firm winning this award again in 12 months’ time?