Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Compliance Platform─Fidessa

This year's compliance category win makes it a hat-trick of wins for London-headquartered Fidessa, as it maintains its dominance in an area that continues to receive increased levels of scrutiny from regulators and investors alike. But Fidessa's Sentinel offering is far more substantial than a simple rules engine: It forms part of the firm's integrated front-office platform, boasting order and execution management systems and full portfolio management functionality─all successful products in their own right with significant buy-side traction as discrete implementations─offering buy-side organizations tight integration between functions and minimizing front-office workers' swivel-chair headaches. This integration drive is something Fidessa has worked on extensively in the past with clients to more tightly integrate compliance into their decision-making processes, resulting in the generation of fully compliant orders and helping them implement trading decisions in the market more quickly.

Sophisticated support for key regulations such as Dodd- Frank in the US, and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (Mifid II), European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and the Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities IV (Ucits IV) in Europe, impacting buy-side trading and compliance workflows, have been folded into Sentinel. Recent updates include support for Ucits funds, in addition to formal Ucits rules libraries─functionality buy-side firms expect from their providers, allowing them to comply with Ucits regulatory guidelines. Global exposure and commitment-ratio rules are also supported, as are over-the-counter (OTC) counterparty and combined counterparty/ issuer concentration limits.

This past year, Fidessa responded to buy-side demand for cloud-based and hosted offerings by launching a fully hosted version of Sentinel. This initiative, however, is far more than simply another hosted application: Fidessa takes responsibility for rule coding, regulatory updates, data management, list maintenance, and platform upgrades, in addition to the hosting and day-to-day operations of the system─an attractive package for buy-side firms seeking market-leading compliance functionality that will allow them to get on with the task at hand of managing client money.