BST Awards 2019: Best Integrated Back-Office Platform—FIS

Andrew Bateman, executive vice president of capital markets solutions at FIS, boils down his clients’ business challenges into four categories: increasing complexity, integration, automation and going digital. Addressing those challenges is FIS’ Investment Operations Suite, which covers 85,000 portfolios and 1,000 fund groups, and wins the best integrated back-office platform category in this year’s BST Awards. “Asset managers are looking for other ways to generate returns consistently for their clients,” Bateman explains. “What they’ve turned to is generating more multi-class portfolios. Instead of having straight equities and bonds, they pull in more illiquid asset classes like private equity and real estate. And while they have been really successful in helping smooth out the potential ups and downs that can come with straight equity or bond portfolios, they come with more complexity.”

That’s where automation and integration can assist: Over the past year, FIS has invested in APIs and web-based integration across its suite, allowing users to focus on their data needs rather than complex implementation projects. For connectivity between tools, InvestOne, FIS’ accounting platform, has recently been integrated with other specialist engines, including the firm’s private equity and derivatives platforms. Bringing that all together is the workflow solution—incorporating robotic process automation technology and fine-tuned over the last year—which automates functions including pricing, calculating net-asset values (NAVs) and generating reports.

There have also been upgrades to the solution’s digital technology. New dashboards, interactive charts and customizable settings can be accessed via a new digital portal, which sits across all of FIS’ tools. “Clients want to see things in the dashboard and want to be able to click on a bar chart and have it change, and drill down into different data specifics,” Bateman says. “That may be external clients, and even internally, there’s a performance or risk department that wants to be able to slice and dice data. There are multiple use-cases for how people interact with the data—we want to give them a solution that covers all those use-cases.”