Enterprise data management specialist Gresham’s latest addition to its portfolio of offerings has seen it forge a collaboration with accounting technology provider FundGuard.
The partnership, which will integrate FundGuard’s multi-book investment accounting capabilities into Gresham’s EDM platform, takes the ambitious London- and New York-based company deeper into the tech stacks of financial institutions as their diversifying investment theses increase the complexity of their accounting and reporting obligations.Institutional investors, asset managers and fund administrators will now be able to work from a single source of trusted and auditable data across public, private and alternative assets spaces.
“There’s always been this notion of having sort of a golden copy on the data side of things; now companies are looking for almost a golden copy in the IBOR accounting world as well,” Gresham chief revenue officer Nathan Wolaver told Data Management Insight. “That is why we thought the synergies between the two companies were really good.”
Complex Accounting
In public markets, investment accounting is relatively straight-forward but in the more opaque private and alternative markets, the process is more complicated. It must have regard for a wider variety of investment vehicles, asset types and investors. It also relies on financial reports that don’t follow common schedules and data that is often incomplete. Fund structures are also complex, increasingly diversified and geographically spread.
These complexities make it a challenge for investors to build their total portfolios that take stock of all the asset types and funds they hold.
FundGuard’s cloud-native investment accounting engine can help them create cross-asset class investment books of record (IBOR) and accounting books of record (ABOR). Within Gresham’s EDM, clients can also access reconciliation tools and workflows on a single system that also provides validated data inputs, lineage and a governance backbone.
“A lot of these firms need much more information about their assets and require more automation for private assets; our system allows that data collection to happen across multiple vendors or manual sources,” Wolaver said. “The FundGuard IBOR can ingest all that information easily, reducing time to new asset classes, new types of funds like private asset, private credit and so on.”
Expansion Plans
The FundGuard collaboration is the latest in a programme of expansionary developments that are positioning Gresham as a one-stop-shop for investment firms that want a total portfolio view of their holdings. Traditionally a data reconciliation service provider, Gresham merged with data management specialist Alveo in 2024 before acquiring the EDM business of S&P Global earlier this year.
Chief executive Mark Hepsworth told Data Management Insight at the time of the S&P Global deal that he saw the company’s future as a broad-based provider of outsourced data services.
“Larger is better – we have some very large customers and increasingly we see customers looking to outsource more through managed services; I think it’s important to have the scale to be able to do that,” Hepsworth said.
Wolaver noted that while many organisations were looking to rationalise their data and tech estates into a single platform, Gresham recognised that the model was not ideal for everyone.
“What we saw in the industry was that there are a lot of firms out there that don’t want to go whole hog and lose their relationships with the data vendors,” he said.
“Customers love their data relationships; they love their vendors. All their systems are already plumbed with that data. So they’re going to want to still have relationships.”
For institutions that have traditionally operated in public markets, their books of record – accounting and investment – have been relatively easy to build owing to the structured nature of the data they deal with.
But as they have branched into private markets, where the data is not only thinner on the ground but also stored in unstructured sources such as PDFs and even paper documents, those books are harder to build. Fragmented data architectures and the intra-day reporting challenges make the job even harder.
With the collaboration in place and clients accessing the joint services via connected APIs from both providers, Gresham is looking for its next expansionary move.
Wolaver said the company is considering carefully how it can augment its offerings and create new ones with AI. With support from its parent company STG, which has built an AI lab to sandbox innovative ideas, Gresham also plans to leverage its data warehouse to provide more capabilities to clients.
“We are right now heads down in AI enablement,” he said. “We are looking at selective partners to work with in some of those ways.”
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