This month, we take a look back at last year’s “14 for ‘14” – our montage of industry predictions and trends paired with movie themes. This year, we’re reflecting back and grading ourselves on the accuracy of our predictions with the familiar thumbs-up/thumbs-down scale.
Grab your ballot and popcorn and see how we did as we recap and update our earlier thinking on the key themes for 2014, including the hits, retakes, sequels, and script revisions that the year brought us:
1. IBOR – The Sequel
Everyone’s favorite four-letter, IBOR, did not run away and hide in 2014. If anything, the marketing push intensified, as software vendors and service providers alike continued to push their IBOR vision and offerings to the forefront of industry conversation. We saw IBOR white-papers pop into our email from front-office vendors, major custodian banks, consultancies and of course, the portfolio and fund accounting solution vendors that were primarily responsible for pushing the acronym in the first place. That said, a formal definition from the asset management community has continued to prove elusive despite the presence of working groups and conference activity devoted to the topic. IBOR and its cousins ABOR, MBOR and TBOR appear here to stay.
It is our job at Citisoft to guide our clients as they navigate the disparate options and solutions addressing the ultimate goal of all of this – ensuring that they have an efficient investment management process designed to ensure accurate and timely positions, cash and trading activity from the front to the back of the house. The devil is in the details!
2. RFPs + POCs – (Casting Call)
There are probably more than a few vendors/providers who would pay good money to make the RFP process go away towards the end of the year, but alas, the RFP is not dead. The industry is in the midst of a new cycle of technology investment and operating model change and so both RFP and Proof of Concept activity was been strong throughout 2014, albeit focused on different functional areas. RFP’s were active in 2014 for core systems and services such as accounting and broader middle office outsourcing, while POC’s have continued to be a popular path in areas that are data consumption-focused including investment data analytics and client reporting.
Looking forward to 2015, we expect the POC will be an increasingly popular choice for evaluations for two reasons: 1) Vendors in less mature areas such as global settlement systems, EDM tools, and reporting applications are pushing for POC’s to establish credibility with new clients and 2) fewer core vendors overall and a clear appetite from them to leverage partnerships (ex. business intelligence and reporting) will inevitably lead to vendors claiming “we have a partner tool that can do that,” and investment manager’s saying “prove it.”
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