SimCorp, a global leader in investment management technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Axyon AI, a fintech specialist in AI-driven predictive analytics. The collaboration will integrate Axyon AI’s technology directly into the SimCorp One platform, aiming to provide portfolio managers with seamless access to AI-powered signals and alpha-generation tools.
The move addresses a critical challenge in the investment management industry. While a recent Global InvestOps Report found that 75% of buy-side executives recognise the potential of AI, many still require guidance on how to apply it effectively within their established workflows. This partnership is designed to bridge that gap by embedding sophisticated predictive capabilities into the familiar environment of SimCorp One, lowering the barriers to adoption and helping firms move from data to decision more efficiently.For SimCorp, the partnership is a key part of its open platform strategy, which focuses on carefully selecting best-in-class partners to enhance its core offering without adding complexity for the client.
A Curated, Integrated Approach
Anders Kirkeby, Head of Open Innovation at SimCorp, explains the value of this curated approach to TradingTech Insight. “By carefully curating our partners, we are putting a stamp of approval on them, effectively saying that SimCorp has vetted them. We provide genuine value through this approach. With so many firms doing AI in this space, our curation process narrows the field and makes it easier for our clients by de-risking their choice. Traditionally, every single time you add a new vendor, it comes with a substantial overhead. When we add partners to our programme, we take care of the integration so the client doesn’t need to worry about it. As a client, if you adopt one of our partners like Axyon AI, you don’t have to take on additional IT project risk.”
This integrated approach is designed to empower portfolio managers and quants by giving them direct access to advanced analytics that can be tested and trusted. “What Axyon AI provides with SimCorp is the ability for SimCorp clients to adopt AI into the alpha generation toolchain without the ssometimes significant barrier to entry of having to run an IT project to integrate a new tool,” notes Kirkeby. “You can run a backtest against past performance and then use it in a real-world scenario on your own portfolio and see how it works. And you can delve into the details it provides, which allows you to explore a large number of dimensions and the correlations they identify.”
Model-Agnostic Engine
At the heart of the Axyon AI solution is a sophisticated and model-agnostic engine designed to find the most effective predictive techniques for a given task. Daniele Grassi, co-founder and CEO of Axyon AI, provides insight into the technology. “Our auto machine learning (AutoML) platform automatically selects both the relevant data sets and the best-performing algorithms for a given prediction task. Originally, this included genetic algorithms, simpler neural networks, deep learning, etc., but over time, we have continuously added new frameworks and architectures, to include transformers, memory-based neural network models, and tree-based boosting models, amongst others. So the prediction a user sees might be generated by a diverse mix of a few boosting-based models, some deep learning models, and some transformer-based models, all combined to generate one final prediction.”
But what does this complex assembly of models actually produce for the end-user? Grassi clarifies that the output is designed to be actionable and intuitive for investment professionals. “The type of prediction we generate is traditionally a ranking,” he says. “Given an investment universe, we rank the securities within it in terms of expected relative performance over several time horizons, from one week to several months. At the user’s request, the system can also suggest potential trades or strategies, for example a pair trade linked to a certain security. This is also coupled with insights on the data that triggered the models, which the user can use as a starting point for further research, with all the information integrated and linked to their actual holdings.”
Expalinability
Addressing the industry buzz around generative AI, Grassi also explains how Axyon AI leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) not for prediction, but to solve one of AI’s biggest challenges: explainability. “With all the hype around generative and large-language models, people ask us why we don’t use them for predictions,” he notes. “The answer is that they are not made for this type of prediction in such a complex world. However, they do have a very important capability which I think is still slightly underused: the ability to explain how more traditional machine learning models reason. And that’s how we use them, to create a narrative on top of the way the predictive models have worked with the data. Leveraging generative AI in this way allows us to provide a full drill-down, starting from the market positioning of an AI-powered strategy right down to the logic and reasoning around the data that the model utilised.”
Ultimately, the partnership between SimCorp and Axyon AI reflects a broader trend of major platform providers embedding specialised fintech solutions to accelerate innovation. By integrating Axyon’s predictive power directly into the daily workflow of portfolio managers, SimCorp aims to transform AI from a theoretical advantage into a practical, trusted tool for alpha generation.
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