No matter what sectors they trade in or what strategies they employ, buy-side firms must carry out an extensive set of complex day-to-day processes to effectively run their business. In a perfect world, technology would seamlessly support these processes – but historically, it has added as much complexity as it has relieved. Due to outdated workflows, architectural inflexibility and vendor fragmentation, many funds have struggled to achieve operational efficiency while ensuring accuracy and controlling costs.
Until now. Announced this month, the launch of LBX PMS 2.0 will enable us to serve the needs of our clients in new and more comprehensive ways. Our new offering includes everything funds need to carry out key portfolio management functions – rebalancing, order generation, bookkeeping, reconciliation, IBOR – but its real power lies in how it complements our other products. Built on a single code base, LBX – our modular, cloud- and API-based POEMS featuring a wide array of order and execution management tools with built-in FIX connectivity – is uniquely well-suited to meet our clients’ every need across the entire trade lifecycle.
This approach offers significant value amid a cluttered vendor landscape. Managing multiple providers, integrating disparate systems, compromising on performance in the name of comprehensiveness – all of these things can lead to significant workflow friction and translate into real dollars lost. Now, with the addition and enhancement of capabilities spanning reconciliation, accounting and more, clients can work with us to handle their every trading need from front to back, giving them a single point of access to a massive range of best-in-class tools. While we’ve always been built for some of this functionality (including core accounting functions like tracking tax lots and understanding basis prices), our new launch will see it greatly enhanced and fully integrated into our front end, a response to industry demand for this wholesale approach. This is a particularly powerful offering for smaller funds, who are typically less equipped to handle the complexity of managing multiple systems.
Our accounting capabilities are a particularly good example of how we reduce costs while minimizing operational friction and integration work. We offer the tools and functionality that funds require to maintain their P&L for all transactions, including swap financing, with hyper-specific tracking of the cash flows and performance analytics, as well as reconciliation and drill-down capabilities. We cover crucial, hard-to-service aspects of the trade lifecycle, such as repos, accruals and resets, and delve into the nuances of corporate actions, supporting backdated amendments so operations staff can enjoy a streamlined experience. We do all of this while maintaining the focus on automation that extends throughout our product suite – just like in the OMS space, even leading PMS and accounting systems often require extensive manual work and exceptions. By building on the infrastructure we have been delivering for nearly two decades, we provide an easier path. We cover equities, bonds, swaps, CFDs, FX and more, giving us the flexibility to support virtually any strategy.
This sense of flexibility can be found throughout LBX. We make it simple to create templates and rapidly add new products and events, as opposed to creating new masters just to change minute details. We also enable highly configurable cash management workflows, including the ability to pre-load allocations and redemptions and schedule notifications while ensuring alignment with transaction ledger data. Even firms that want to stick with their legacy systems can use LBX PMS 2.0 as an overlay, with our modular technology operating alongside existing solutions – effectually a shadow NAV for the shadow NAV, or a financing calculation engine for an incumbent PMS.
Our recent acquisition of Messer, a boutique capital markets fintech provider renowned for its accounting and reconciliation capabilities, has only enhanced our PMS offerings with more sophisticated multi-asset support and high-performance computation. Our cloud-based, multitenant architecture has allowed for seamless integration with Messer’s system, just as we have long enabled product enhancements and third-party integrations based on client requests. All of this, combined with end-to-end functionality and powerful workflow management tools, enables a level of control not found in traditionally rigid accounting systems.
With this array of capabilities and holistic approach, funds can achieve unprecedented operational efficiency and automation – employees are saved from getting into the weeds of trade breaks, enabling them to complete tasks more rapidly and focus on value-adding work. Reduced risk and cost savings follow naturally. We deliver everything required to bring about these efficiencies today while laying a foundation for growth, expansion and scalable performance tomorrow.
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