The investment industry today is more information intensive and data dependent than ever.
The investment industry today is more information intensive and data dependent than ever. Investment professionals must be able to manage all the information they gather on their investment ideas effectively, and then locate and retrieve any single piece of research quickly and easily. However, in recent years, the industry has struggled with a massive influx of investment information – sell-side research, email, independently produced analysis, news, internet content, earnings calls and more.
In addition, the marketplace today demands greater transparency, objectivity, and accountability. An organised approach to investment research is a competitive necessity, and potentially compliance imperative.
But the problem is not just the sheer volume of data and its rate of acquisition, but also the lack of structure to that data. A firm’s information is typically scattered across multiple systems and applications that are not designed to support the research process. Firms and fund managers need a systematic, integrated approach to organise and analyse the detailed information that shapes their investment ideas.
Portfolio managers of fundamentally driven strategies generate alpha through the way they discover, research and evaluate ideas and many of them have their own unique investment decision making workflows. The explosion of information, statistics, and opinions on companies, sectors, and markets – and the challenge of managing it all within a well defined workflow – has focused attention on the emerging field of research management solutions (RMS).
Advent, through its recent acquisition of Tamale Software, is now offering a product specifically designed for this research process – Advent Tamale RMS. It creates a centralised information hub where firms can easily aggregate, track, store, search, and access data from a variety of sources. It helps investment teams collaborate more effectively and, ultimately, make timelier and better informed investment decisions.
Investment managers are constantly barraged with investment research information from a variety of sources – broker emails management conference calls, online subscriptions, market data feeds, as well as internal proprietary research. Advent Tamale RMS helps them manage and make sense of it all, while making sure they don’t miss any critical piece of data. They can coordinate their research process with their daily workflow much more efficiently. Portfolio and fund managers can easily and quickly produce a tear sheet of key company data. This functionality gives them a high degree of visibility into their research analysts’ activity and a clearer picture of investment opportunities. Thus, they can deliver the right guidance and direction more quickly and with a higher measure of confidence to individual analysts and teams.
In an uncertain economic environment, these solutions can bring an efficient structure to large volumes of unstructured data. This not only significantly reduces the cost of managing information, but also increases the productivity and effectiveness of the investment professional. Investment firms face growing regulatory pressure to maintain an audit trail of investment recommendations and to tie research to investment decisions and to commissions paid.
Advent Tamale RMS provides a structured, transparent way to centralise and evaluate research, and provides investment professionals with instant access to all historical research ideas, trades, and performance.
When you look at RMS from every angle -competitive advantage, client relations, cost control, efficiency and compliance-it is clear that RMS is now a mission critical component of the front office infrastructure.
Mark Rice, Senior Vice President and General Manager for RMS, Advent Software
