Eze Achieves Single-Platform Goal with Investment Suite Release

“When I think about the substance of this announcement, it’s a culmination of effort over many years, but we truly believe that at this point we have a distinct advantage that we can provide to asset managers by covering the lion’s share of their investment management lifecycle,” says Bill Neuman, senior managing director and head of research and development at Eze Software. “I’ve personally never experienced this level of success in getting to this level of fidelity of integration between the systems, working as arm’s-length partners.”

Eze’s products have tended to have storied histories as individual platforms. Eze’s execution management system (EMS), for instance, was previously known as RealTick and was an industry-standard platform in its own right, while its portfolio management system (PMS), Tradar, has been a staple of buy-side technology estates.

With the release of Investment Suite, Eze has given asset managers a choice of taking the range of its platforms as a single product or on an a la carte basis, either through local installations or cloud delivery. While each functions on its own, Neuman says, the workflow benefits that they gain by working in sync act as a force multiplier.

“We think the benefit that accrues to managers is that each product is great on its own—and of course, all the industry standard integrations we’ve had with third-party products continue to be there and they’re an important part of our ecosystem—but when you install more than one of our products together, something special happens, and one-plus-one equals three, if you will,” he says.

The company will release new features every six weeks, with development cycles aligned between the products. Initial upgrades have focused on expanding the range of reporting options for compliance with the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, while future releases are likely to center on enhancing the scale of its order management system (OMS) and adding functionality to Eze Investor Accounting, as well as Eze PMS.

“We’d like the OMS to be able to support larger and larger numbers of holdings and portfolios, and be able to address our larger-sized asset managers, and maybe push further upmarket,” Neuman says. “There’s been quite a bit of focus on the accounting side—we’ve done a lot recently and are continuing to work to expand the footprint and capabilities to make the US market as applicable as possible. Really, we’ll be cleaning up and improving user workflows. Things that might have been manual—for example, in the PMA some more infrequently-occurring corporate actions that might have had to have been manually accommodated—are becoming more automated.”