Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Compliance Product—Fidessa

Sentinel has, over the course of the last 12 months, undergone seven major updates to better address the new regulatory landscape, shaped both in the US with the Department of Labor (DoL) regulation and in Europe with the upcoming Mifid II regulation.

The key to delivering any successful product across the capital markets is to listen to and understand clients’ needs, and deliver a platform designed specifically to address those needs.

In this respect, Fidessa is planning on rolling out a new feature—event risk functionality—on the platform over the coming months, a unique type of risk measurement, which examines whether a possible key event could have consequences to firms’ investment strategies, a discussion topic among the vendor’s client base.

Its official release is yet to be determined, but Fidessa has been working intensively with its clients to see how Sentinel can be used to explore event risks in advance in order to assess how an event could impact compliance variables within portfolios.

Richard Hooke, Fidessa’s buy-side product director, explains that this functionality will allow buy-side firms to use the compliance system more widely within their organizations. “It is a centralized place where a lot of the business rules and risks are represented in a well-codified and well-structured way,” he says.

Fidessa has been working intensively with its clients to see how Sentinel can be used to explore event risks in advance in order to assess how an event could impact compliance variables within portfolios.

By adopting Sentinel’s pre-empted compliance system, users can ensure that they remain compliant if the examined event takes place, while it is able to capture compliance information during the earlier stages in the investment workflow.

But Fidessa’s biggest bet for the future is to ensure that Sentinel does not fall into the category of a static checkpoint tool, as can happen with compliance products. Its challenge, therefore, is to develop Sentinel into a platform that supports and delivers genuine business value along the whole of the investment process.

To that end, Fidessa is looking to drive Sentinel into areas outside of the compliance department, aspiring to disseminate compliance-related information out of the middle office and across the whole enterprise.