Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Compliance Product—Fidessa’s Compliance Solution

Fidessa has won the best compliance category for four out of the past five years, although it has done anything but rest on its laurels.

Due to customer demand, Fidessa has released its internally used Analytics Builder tool, which allows clients to expand the range of things they can test, says Robin Strong, director of buy-side strategy at Fidessa. In the past, clients would make notes of what they wanted to test for, and Fidessa would add the enhancement in its next release. Now, through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery capabilities, the firm can add the functionality if and when it is needed. “We’ve been trying to find ways to make customers more self-sufficient, and that’s been very productive,” Strong says.

In addition to breaking into the Japanese market—according to Fidessa, it has signed the largest asset manager in Japan—the firm has been actively rolling out additional Ucits support and added formal Ucits rule libraries. Global exposure and commitment-ratio rules are now supported, as are over-the-counter (OTC) counterparty and combined counterparty/issuer concentration limits. Fidessa has also extended its real-time risk engine to cover asset classes beyond foreign exchange (FX), in addition to recently delivering a real-time risk engine for counterparty exposure. Finally, London-based Fidessa has also been actively helping compliance officers to more easily demonstrate why an event has occurred, providing more evidence of pre- and post-trade events than in previous versions of the platform.

“The ongoing effect of all this regulation and the perceived threat in the market has driven clients to demand a lot of transparency,” explains Strong. “A lot of what we are doing is enabling clients to not just test compliance, but to log the fact that they tested for compliance in order to prove what the results were, and to be able to report those findings in a sensible way to the regulators or an end client. What we’re talking about is a whole level of accountability and auditability.” —AM