Buy-Side Technology Awards 2015: Best Buy-Side Compliance Product—Fidessa

“It’s difficult when you are one of the pack—you tend not to worry about what the rest of them are doing,” says Paul Nokes, Fidessa’s global buy-side CEO. “You worry about your own responsibilities, your own relationship with your clients and your own sales. If that sets you apart, it sets you apart.”

Sentinel, the platform responsible for so much of Fidessa’s success in the BST Awards over the years, is designed to allow asset managers to decommission disparate peripheral systems, providing them with a series of trading controls based on monitoring discrete transactions in addition to the overall portfolio impact. This allows compliance and risk teams to create pre- and post-trade controls around three core operational risk areas: must/cannot trade rules, cross-trading restrictions, and counterparty and trade exposure limits.

For Fidessa, flexibility is key. With regulations like the AIFMD and Ucits V set to come into force on March 18 next year, and with investment strategies becoming increasingly complex, Fidessa believes that asset managers place huge value on a compliance product’s flexibility. One means through which Fidessa provides this flexibility is the analytic builder, a rules-based toolkit, allowing users to tailor analytics to an “advanced” mode, enabling greater monitoring and control of the business flow by using complex custom calculations and directly definable formulas. This allows buy-side firms to reduce the time it takes to create new analytics to support regulations and new, increasingly complex, trading strategies.

“The regulations and mandates come so quickly that managers need flexibility,” Nokes explains. “Although you need that flex in a compliance product, it still has to come with the same standards of performance and reliability. There’s no point making something flexible if once you start it up it grinds to a halt.” 

For 2016, Fidessa aims to analyze and respond quickly to change on the compliance front. “Over the last five to seven years, the finance environment has really changed. Five years ago, cost pressures really started to bite. A short while thereafter, regulatory pressures ramped up,” Nokes says. “What we’re seeing now is a movement away from a negative approach. For example, rather than just hearing the compliance department says no, in the future, the compliance department will become increasingly collaborative in investment decisions."

For Fidessa, flexibility is key. With regulations like the AIFMD and Ucits V set to come into force on March 18 next year, and with investment strategies becoming increasingly complex, Fidessa believes that asset managers place huge value on a compliance product’s flexibility.