Unigestion Chooses AIM Software for EDM Needs

Firms are making it clear that they prefer targeted business applications, rather than tools-based custom development, when it comes to enterprise data management, says Vienna-based Josef Sommeregger, global head of sales at AIM Software.

He was speaking to Inside Reference Data as AIM announced that Geneva-based asset manager Unigestion has chosen its solution, GAIN, to meet data needs across the front, middle and back office.

"We have been in the market for more than 15 years, and what we did at the beginning was very similar to what a first-generation service provider was doing at that time," says Sommeregger. "But we took a decision four years ago to move away from that approach because we—and our clients—saw it as too heavy and inflexible. We moved into a new approach to enterprise data management that we call business applications."

GAIN differs from more traditional products on the market because it includes purpose-built applications, handling static reference data, pricing, corporate actions and entity data, says Sommeregger.

"Clients more and more want to have something out of the box, at least for a big portion of their business use cases. If you want to do that, you need to put data management into a business context," he says. "Our business application is a packaged set of business functions, including end-user UIs and the possibility for business to configure the application as the business grows and changes without having to go back to IT."

Unigestion ran a proof of concept, ultimately choosing GAIN over Markit's EDM offering. Alanh-Hubert Husson, chief project officer at Unigestion, commented: "We have chosen GAIN over its competitors because of its unique strategy to deliver targeted business applications rather than tool-based custom development. in addition, AIM was the only firm to actually address our needs over the complete lifecycle of financial instruments, starting from research (pre-trade) to the management of instrument data held in our investment portfolios."

AIM was also preferred because it has a strong partnership with SimCorp: GAIN is fully integrated with SimCorp's Dimension investment management solution, which Unigestion has previously implemented.

Unigestion is a fast-growing asset manager with an elaborate, tailored portfolio, says Sommeregger, and "the primary driver for their choosing AIM was to have a complete system of data governance on the business processes to underpin their operations, so that if investors ask what happened on any day of the year, they could give them a complete biography ... this has become more and more important for asset managers, coming from regulations, to be able to provide this biography at any stage."

Unigestion started the rollout of GAIN across all asset classes in late August. Sommeregger says it hopes to complete the process in the second quarter of next year.