About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Debate Argues the Case for an Investment Book of Records

Subscribe to our newsletter

Vendors have begun to develop Investment Book of Record (IBOR) solutions and in-house teams are beginning to build them, but issues around what an IBOR should look like, how it should work and whether it will deliver benefits remain open to question.

Ian Hunt, a consultant and subject matter expert working with M&G Investment Management to develop an IBOR, presented his views on these issues at a recent ISITC Europe conference before taking part in a panel discussion on the subject. At a basic level, he noted that an IBOR is about making position data consistent, complete and timely for investment managers. He questioned why position data is not quality managed in the same way as market data, and warned of the risks of poor position data, such as the marketing risk of publishing inconsistent data and the compliance risk of using the wrong position data.

Hunt described the typical derivation of position data from end-of-day accounting systems, a process that makes intraday positions presented in the front office an incomplete, real-time update of a partially enriched and retrospective end-of-day view.

Noting the need to move on and ensure integrity in records used for investment and regulatory compliance, he proposed a single source of position data that cuts through the diversity of event types to deliver a generalised IBOR. This, he said, would create certainly around the impact of using position data.

A vendor IBOR solution, he suggested, should include a single, consistent source of position data for all applications and a workflow platform for data quality management. It should not be based on an accounting solution or a transaction processing application. With this kind of solution in place, information management and risk systems could use an IBOR rather accounting data and a database could be populated to provide accurate position data for business intelligence and decision making. This type of solution, said Hunt, would provide more accurate, complete and consistent data for the front office and require less work on position data in the back office.

Convening a panel discussion on the potential of IBOR, Alan Towndrow, group IS director at M&G Investment Management and lead of the company’s IBOR project, asked whether an IBOR will become a prerequisite for business. Geoff Harries, global head of asset servicing at DST Global Solutions, said he expected this to be the case, but that the IBOR concept is in the early adoption stage and it will take five to ten years and a step change away from accounting for it to become a de facto business standard. Igor Lobanov, enterprise architect at L&G Investment Management, agreed, suggesting IBOR will be adopted as it will be difficult to scale investment business without a central position data solution. He went on to describe a working group of asset managers that is looking at how IBOR can best be developed and commented that IBOR could become a commodity, off-the-shelf product.

While vendors have yet to complete IBOR products, Towndrow questioned take-up as the internal sale of something that is already perceived to be in place can be difficult. Paul Westgate, product manager at Linedata, said the cost of how position data is derived in the current environment and the cost of compensation when position data is wrong could swing the balance and redirect investment.

Ending the session with an interactive question and answer, Towndrow asked: “Is your firm considering an IBOR?” Some 28% of audience participants said yes, their firms are considering an IBOR now; 9% said they are looking at IBOR in the long term; 32% said they are watching developments; 18% said they already have sufficient overview of positions; and 18% said IBOR is just another acronym.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

Implementing and Understanding Modern Data Architectures: Webinar Preview

The evolution of data use by financial institutions has been accompanied by ever-changing challenges to its management. With technologies such as artificial intelligence enabling firms to prise greater value from their data and to subject it to greater utilisation, a new set of data management practices have emerged. These modern data architectures regard data as...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...