AFTAs 2025: Best IT team—TCW Group

Team overview

TCW Group’s Investment Technology Team charter entails:

• Delivering proprietary capabilities that provide competitive advantage across investment teams
• Managing hybrid environments strategically, prioritizing cloud-native solutions ahead of TCW’s 2026 datacenter shutdown
• Integrating vendor investment book of record (IBOR) and accounting book of record (ABOR) platforms across public and private markets for a seamless user experience
• Enabling nimble investment decisions through timely, accurate data
• Monitoring user-developed tools and migrating critical capabilities into TCW Investment Management Engine (TIME), TCW’s cloud-native platform, minimizing redundancy and ensuring long-term scalability

Recent project  

The Investment Technology Team led TCW’s transformation by rebuilding proprietary security selection and unifying workflows in Aladdin, BlackRock’s buy-side-focused technology platform featuring portfolio management, risk analytics, trading tools and compliance functionality. While stabilizing this ecosystem was the 2025 focus, urgent insurance and private markets needs drove rapid integrations—Advent Geneva for private credit and Clearwater Analytics for insurance. These enabled over $1 billion in new asset-backed finance (ABF) business and a multi-billion-dollar insurance opportunity. Despite complexity, the team ensured seamless integration and maintained a unified portfolio view in Snowflake across public and private markets.

Problems solved  

A team of 25 tackled two key challenges for TCW:

• Enabled a unified view across public and private markets
• Streamlined investment workflows across TIME and vendor-developed platforms

Private assets vary in structure and risk. For example, ABF backed by auto loans is a mature and relatively transparent market, while ABF backed by fine art is niche and highly illiquid. Facing rising demands, the team made practical trade-offs, scaling back plans while preserving core functionality. Creative collaboration with vendor implementation teams reduced integration effort, ensuring consistent information to support optimal investment decisions.

Technology developed

The team delivered a flexible technology foundation that could represent the unique characteristics of private market deals where each deal requires dynamic data modeling. Snowflake data sharing enabled a unified data layer across public and private markets without duplicating data. The team also ensured consistent information across platforms, despite varied integration methods for bidirectional communication such as APIs, database syncs, and file extracts. Data remained aligned with vendor systems and supported a seamless investment workflow.

Why they won

By winning the best IT team category in this year’s AFTAs, TCW Group becomes the first three-time winner of this sought-after award. Last year’s win was thanks to the $200 billion, Los Angeles-based asset manager’s Architecture and Engineering Team, while this year’s win was delivered by the firm’s Investment Technology Team.

Technology teams working across the capital markets need a variety of qualities in order to deliver measurable and lasting value to the business, chief among which are clarity, focus, flexibility—not only the ability to pivot and flex according to the changing requirements of the business, but also the ability to work with internal and external technologies/firms and ensure genuine interoperability between them—and deep technical skill. Clearly, TCW’s Investment Technology Team has these qualities in bucketloads.

The team won this award on the back of the meaningful change it delivered across an increasingly complex investment landscape, while simultaneously maintaining stability and ensuring data quality/integrity across the business. It unified public and private market views in Snowflake, rebuilt its proprietary security selection functionality, aligned workflows in its Aladdin implementation/platform, and integrated two externally delivered platforms—Geneva from SS&C Advent and Clearwater Analytics—to support new business initiatives in the private credit and insurance sectors.

TCW Group’s three consecutive wins in the AFTAs are no fluke—they reflect the skill and value the firm’s tech teams bring to the business, not only as a support mechanism, but also as a competitive differentiator and means of enabling/extending the business. It will be interesting to see which of TCW’s tech teams get the firm’s nomination when next year’s AFTAs roll around.