Finbourne Debuts Lusid Platform, Aims to Become Market Utility

Finbourne Technology, based in London, launched its Liberated Unified Secure Investment Data-machine, or Lusid, earlier this month. While complicated in its ambitions and technology, the platform ultimately aims to provide a common interface layer for “non-differentiating activities” in asset management, essentially removing the need to manage onboarding and upgrades in-house.

“Our clients are challenged because their technology infrastructure has not kept pace with the rate of change dictated by their clients, by their regulators and by the new culture of transparency,” says Dermot Shortt, co-founder at Finbourne. “The systems most managers use are built on legacy technology, making them very expensive to run, difficult to interface with each other, and unfit for the big-data and scalability problems our clients face.”

Finbourne has dubbed this approach “investment platform-as-a-service,” and is currently in contract negotiations with a number of with global asset managers, it says. Information giant Thomson Reuters has also taken a minority stake in the company, which was incorporated in December 2016 and is staffed by industry veterans—Shortt, for instance, was the global head of UBS Delta, while co-founder Benedict Nielsen most recently served as head of debt capital markets syndicate for EMEA at Nomura. Other members of staff count Morgan Stanley, the Royal Bank of Scotland and similar institutions on their resumes.

“Where clients address [these issues] by migration to one ‘integrated’ vendor, they are forced to use the workflow of that vendor, and therefore lose choice,” Shortt says. “We’ll never prescribe what data, analytics, risk, performance modules someone should use. We’ll build a common ledger that our clients can build their own solutions from, or purchase services from vendor offerings that comply with our application programming interfaces (APIs), thereby removing the integration headache.”

The platform has elements of investment book of record (Ibor) and connectivity-layer functionality. Part of its design ensures that data on the platform is stored bi-temporally, meaning that users are able to see information both as it is now, but also as it was at any point in the past. This has applications to all forms of investment data, ranging from pricing and reference data through to portfolio information, and can be used in compliance with record-keeping requirements.

At its heart, the platform ultimately aims to become a form of market utility. Hosted in the cloud, initially through AWS, it has been built with an “API-first” approach, using the same approaches for APIs internally as externally.

This, Shortt believes, gives Lusid an edge over other systems with Ibor or connectivity functionality, in that it becomes workflow-agnostic. Asset managers can, therefore, “build their workflow by choosing vendor X for risk, vendor Y for performance and so forth,” he says.

“We want to solve the ‘integration’ and ‘upgrade’ problem, by providing a best-in-breed solution to commodity workflows and system integrations. For example, rather than everyone incurring the expense of integration with a large custodian, or with vendor data, we do it once for all users. The buy side has historically not been great at cross-industry collaboration to remove costs. We want to change this,” Shortt says.