Fidessa group plc (LSE: FDSA) has announced the launch of the latest version of its award-winning investment management system (IMS). Combining sophisticated portfolio management, real-time position management, compliance, order management, routing and execution capabilities, V14 of the Fidessa IMS provides a single, seamless workflow platform across business lines, geographies and asset classes, delivering the reliability and functionality required by the most demanding investment managers.

In today’s highly competitive markets, buy-sides face an unprecedented set of challenges: increasing market complexity across a broad range of asset classes; global coverage and elusive liquidity in fragmented markets; on-going pressures arising from global regulatory reform; continued client demands for transparency; shrinking margins and the pressure to reduce operational costs. To combat these challenges, firms require a single, integrated front-office workflow platform that operates over the entire investment lifecycle and that can add value at every stage.

Richard Hooke, Product Director at Fidessa, comments: “The patchwork approach, where disparate systems are held together by a network of complex and error-prone integration, can no longer support the increasingly demanding requirements from a regulatory, operational risk and cost of ownership perspective. This latest version of Fidessa IMS addresses these challenges and provides a harmonised workflow platform that allows investment managers to run their businesses in an efficient, transparent and operationally robust manner, while having the flexibility to respond quickly to business change.”

Increased regulation, coupled with increasingly complex client mandates, mean that compliance is a key area of focus for the buy-side now more than ever. IMS V14 introduces Active Compliance, which provides easy access to a suite of real-time, pre-trade compliance checking controls across multiple orders at time of entry and throughout their lifecycle. This Active Compliance background checking is becoming crucial for orders that are hard to work as a result of reduced liquidity, especially in fixed income. In addition, a new Smart Search feature helps compliance staff maintain and monitor an orderly rule set whilst at the same time create and implement new, more sophisticated checks in real time. This is a huge benefit in an environment where increasingly robust checks are required across an increasingly complex instrument set.

Managing and monitoring compliance is obviously key, but being able to prove compliance as well as detail performance, both internally and for clients, is vitally important now too. This latest version of IMS expands the reporting and distribution capabilities of the platform giving full transparency of the client’s complete trading activity across business lines and asset classes.

“In order to help clients deal with the increasing complexity of the front-office landscape, V14 provides a series of intelligent tools to assist in all stages of the workflow, from real-time intelligent modelling through to smart order routing”, continues Hooke. “V14 also delivers simplified integration facilities allowing specialist front-office apps, such as risk and performance attribution, to be plugged into the core workflow platform in a simple and low-impact manner.”

Fidessa’s IMS platform is one of the key pillars of the firm’s overall support for the buy-side, together with Fidessa’s compliance service, Fidessa’s Position Dynamics – an IBOR solution currently in development – and its recently launched affirmation management service (AMS) and post-trade hub which allows for low-cost trade affirmations with Fidessa’s extensive global community of sell-side firms. In addition to the huge functional advancements available in V14, the platform has been technically re-engineered to deliver significantly enhanced performance characteristics and facilitate the adoption of the latest security technologies.

Underpinned by a relentless program of re-investment, Fidessa IMS is delivered using an optimised cost-of-ownership model, leveraging a unique combination of software and managed services.