Regulatory and investor pressures are pushing asset management companies to optimize back-office operations, executives at Eze Software Group told Markets Media.

“We’re seeing more of our client and prospect base looking to consolidate the desktop in the sense of having more seamless workflows between all of the point solutions that they have,” said Rob Agne, director and head of product management at Eze Software Group. “We obviously have a wealth of clients that leverage both our OMS (order management system) and PMS (portfolio management system), and we continue to evolve our strategy to make it easier to have that front to middle to back office seamless workflow.”

The company has announced deeper integration between its Tradar PMS and Eze OMS, including an API connection, with the aim of creating seamless workflow between the two systems. The integration points include a trade workflow, security auto-creation and end-of-day position synchronization, with further enhancements expected this year.

A PMS serves as the backbone of a firm’s investment operations, providing an accurate and holistic view of portfolios, as well as transaction management, a historic record of transactions and positions, and real-time Net Asset Value.

“What we’ve enhanced here is the ability to track transactional level financing, being able to ensure that the end NAV on a day-to-day basis is correct and all the cash flows to and from the prime broker is also in line as well,” said Neil Sandle, associate director, product management at Eze Software. “This is to ensure that you’re building out the reports, pricing the portfolio, running true corporate actions, adjusting all the positions and then that accrual process right at the end before finalizing the NAV.”

A number of clients are running their portfolios out of Excel spreadsheets, “but with the regulatory pressures and investor pressures, we’re seeing a number of small start-ups, but also other funds that were using in-house systems, wanting to use a best of breed product,” Sandle said. “Because we provide a full front to back solution, clients feel confident that they can have true straight-through processing.”

Eze Software has also enhanced support for trading FX non-deliverable forwards with improved trade workflows, support for the new 2014 ISDA price curves, and enhanced FX and NDF detail in reports.

“Over 2014, we on-boarded a number of FX clients, and what that meant effectively was we needed to improve our support around NDFs, but more importantly improving our ability to process these and provide better workflow for our client base,” Sandle said. “This means the ability from a single transaction form to generate the realized P&Ls, and to ensure that our reports in terms of NAV and cash flow are correctly meeting the requirement of the NDF workflow specifically.”

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