Q&A: Eagle’s Centralization Drive
Paul McInnis, head of EDM at Eagle Investment Systems, discusses how Eagle differentiates itself in an intensely competitive marketplace, and its relationship with BNY Mellon.
Victor Anderson recently caught up with Paul McInnis, head of enterprise data management at Wellesley, MA-based Eagle Investment Systems, to discuss how Eagle goes about differentiating itself in an intensely competitive marketplace, the firm’s EDM strategy and its underlying technology, and its relationship with its parent, BNY Mellon.
Q: In an ever-competitive buy-side market, how does Eagle differentiate itself from its competitors? What is Eagle's "secret sauce"?
Paul McInnis, head of enterprise data management, Eagle Investment Systems: From a technology and solutions perspective, our data-centric model is one of our biggest differentiators, serving as the foundation of our enterprise data management (EDM) solution. With Eagle's single, consolidated, enterprise view of all assets, firms can discover actionable insights, make data-driven decisions, and help meet the business challenges associated with today's complex global markets and regulatory requirements. Eagle has experience in creating not only investment technology solutions, but also best practices in migrating firms off legacy platforms and keeping pace with change.
Q: What are the tangible business benefits of deploying Eagle's Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solution?
McInnis: It all begins with data quality. If you don't have clean, validated data, then reliable business benefits are hard to achieve. Quality data enables the business to better understand opportunities and evaluate risk. All that said, the interest we're seeing in our EDM solution today goes well beyond these factors and underscores the importance of data management overall as firms are executing on business objectives such as launching new products, entering new markets, managing risk, meeting regulatory requirements, and expanding breadth of data to support research and alpha generation.
Further, Eagle's EDM solution enables centralization of the comprehensive investment strategies and structures held by most financial organizations. It also enhances the granularity of the data, which is critical for analysis, performance reporting, and understanding risk. Eagle clients can also gain greater control of data and deploy solutions such as an IBOR to provide the front office with the data needed to start each trading day.
Our technology and software is best-in-class, but since we serve 12 of the 25 largest asset managers in the world and we're supported by our parent company BNY Mellon, we bring a wealth of experience as well.
Finally, one of the most tangible benefits for clients is the collaborative relationship they have with Eagle, which is atypical when you look out across today's larger vendor universe. Our technology and software is best-in-class, but since we serve 12 of the 25 largest asset managers in the world and we're supported by our parent company BNY Mellon, we bring a wealth of experience as well. Through our hands-on service model, we can help clients navigate a very complex and evolving landscape with solutions that are informed and developed through working with the world's leading financial institutions. We can share experiences and best practices that aren't available through a more traditional client/software vendor relationship.
Q: You mentioned the support that BNY Mellon provides to Eagle. How does that relationship improve your offerings to clients?
McInnis: Our relationship with BNY Mellon provides a real and distinct competitive advantage that our clients can see and appreciate. Because of that relationship, Eagle is able to not only innovate within its own walls but also within the walls of BNY Mellon, aligning with other BNY Mellon technology solutions to greatly expand the breadth of capabilities that we are able to offer. Further, there is currently work being done to unite the comprehensive set of solutions onto a single, cloud-based digital ecosystem. Eagle is also afforded the resources to expand our footprint across the globe, leveraging BNY Mellon locations to provide around-the-clock support whether clients are in North America, EMEA or APAC.
Q: What sort of unified BNY Mellon digital ecosystem is in the works? And how does Eagle fit in?
McInnis: In 2015, you may recall, BNY Mellon formed BNY Mellon Technology Solutions (BTS) with Eagle as a key pillar within that effort. The BTS group was formed to combine several key technology assets across BNY Mellon and further leverage these investments and intellectual property to provide greater solutions for clients. From the perspective of Eagle clients, they'll see an expanded ecosystem that feeds into our data management, accounting and performance measurement solutions as well as a more expansive breadth of capabilities within these areas.
As an essential piece of BTS, Eagle is also an important component of BNY Mellon's broader NEXEN strategy, which is the name for BNY Mellon's cloud-based digital ecosystem. As a cloud-based platform, NEXEN will provide an all-encompassing and flexible environment, including an API store to support the development community. There's also a big data environment, called Digital Pulse, that enables users to unearth actionable insights from the information coming out of BNY Mellon and clients' solutions. It's all really exciting and underscores how much value our clients are able to recognize from Eagle's relationship with BNY Mellon.
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