According to Odyssey Financial Technologies, a provider of private wealth and asset management services, private banks and investment managers are not realising the full potential of their technology to support and drive product development.
The statement follows Odyssey’s participation in a panel discussion at the Actuate conference, “How to Interact with Tomorrow’s Investment Clients.” Held in London last Thursday, customers, partners and vendors debated how investment managers could deliver the next generation of client reporting, information management and portfolio management technologies to meet customer expectations.
A representative from one of the UK’s largest wealth management firms told the panel that while infrastructure technologies such as web 2.0 are important to the needs of private banks, back-office technologies are fragmented in their ability to deal with the speed of product innovation across the wealth management and private banking sectors.
Steve D’Souza, general manager, Northern Europe, Odyssey Financial Technologies, says, “Feedback like this indicates a need for a single front office approach to unite disparate middle and back office systems.
“The private banking and asset management sectors are experiencing major changes in product offerings as a result of customer demand for innovation, analysis and service. While many front-office systems have been developed to support each of those requirements, multiple systems in the back end makes consistency difficult. A single front-office platform should be viewed as an enabler of product innovation, adapting quickly to the changing client needs of investment managers while making integration easier.”
Odyssey partners Actuate and IBM will further explore this theme in a forthcoming white paper entitled, “Next generation Wealth Management Exceeding Expectations Through Responsive, Dynamic Client Reporting,” due for release later this month.