Smart desktop technology provider Cosaic has forged a strategic partnership with buy-side technology consultants Reformis to help bring desktop interoperability to investment management firms by leveraging Cosaic’s Finsemble platform.
Under the new partnership, Reformis will assist buy side firms with the implementation of desktop interoperability, using Finsemble as the underlying infrastructure. Finsemble is designed to enable any type of application – legacy, new, in-house or third-party – to share data and connect for seamless workflows, while Reformis specialises in projects across enterprise data management and the implementation of portfolio and order management system (PMS and OMS) solutions at investment management firms.
“The buy side is the major area of growth for desktop interoperability at the moment,” says Dan Schleifer, CEO and co-founder of Cosaic. “Historically, only the big sell-side firms really had the IT resources to implement a digital transformation plan that included interoperability. But we’ve seen a shift over the past 12 to 18 months, with many buy-side firms implementing interop, and seeing demonstrable results in terms of efficiency as a result. Having a partner like Reformis, which has a deep understanding of the buy side, makes a lot of sense. The help that Reformis can offer is not just around the technical implementation, but also helping to establish the vision, the tangible goals, the KPIs that will be used to measure success. That’s really key from our perspective.”
“Every buy side will have some form of a PMS, an OMS, and potentially multiple EMSs [execution management systems],” says Dave Harvey, Interoperability Lead at Reformis. “They’ll also have internal risk tools, their own metrics that they want to load alongside a trading strategy, as well as chat systems. The desktop experience is so fragmented, that the amount of touch points and windows and clicks can be horrendous. So our vision for our end-users is that everything should be contextual, rather than copying and pasting data from one window to another, or dual-keying something from one application to another application.”
Schleifer stresses the importance of not just having a vision, but also a strategy and a tactical plan around prioritising which workloads should be automated. “First we sit down with the users to understand what they do, then we map that out, and then we implement the technological steps in Finsemble to make it happen,” he says. “Reformis is really well positioned to come in and help bring it down into into individual workflows that will affect individual desks. That’s why I’m really happy to see Reformis building this practice and to be partnered with them, because our customers will get more out of their investment in interop by having somebody like Reformis come in and drive the strategy and drive the execution.”
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