Portfolio and Investment Management Solutions for the buy-side communityIn today's financial environment, asset management firms are striving to remain competitive and offer their clients the best returns possible on their investments. With a focus on portfolio and investment management, Microsoft and its broad range of partners can provide investment institutions with the scalable, integrated, cost-effective solutions they need to maintain their competitive edge. Empower investors with integrated data to better meet client needs | Business Challenge | Solution/Benefit |
|---|
Today's investors are sophisticated and educated and have higher expectations of firms that manage their money than ever before. They assume they can get the information they want, when they want it, for reasons of transparency, for self-directed analysis, and to run their own trading. Asset management firms are turning to technology to allow them to personalize information for their clients, using portals and dashboards for enhanced reporting capabilities. | Communicate and share information with your financial services colleagues and clients through shared intelligence and collaborative Web portals using Microsoft technologies, including Office Excel and Office SharePoint Portal Server. |
Supporting technology: Using Excel Services, an Excel spreadsheet can be deployed to a server as an HTML Web application inside a Web browser, rather than stored on a user desktop. When combined with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Excel Services provides the means to collaboratively share a spreadsheet with team members. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007 provides the framework for creating and managing collaborative Web sites and portals that can enable financial users to work more closely with clients and financial specialists. Financial firms can quickly create SharePoint sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, and business intelligence needs. They can use SharePoint technology to conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data, participate in forms-driven business processes, and access and analyze large amounts of business data.
Reduce data complexity and ease compliance requirements | Business Challenge | Solution/Benefit |
|---|
Financial institutions are increasingly affected by non-discretionary business process changes resulting from new regulatory compliance requirements. It is important that firms have flexible business processes in place to respond to these requirements. In addition, before executing any trade, firms also need a clear understanding of the risks associated with that trade and how it will impact the balance of the client's portfolio. These decisions require the processing and analysis of vast amounts of market and trade data to ensure the investment strategy is appropriate. Technology that provides data security is also a growing necessity for financial institutions due to the many regulations concerned with data security. There is also a new competitive pressure around the speed (latency) of execution and the sophistication of the algorithms used in the trading market that is increasingly impacting the buy-side community. | Reduce data complexity and improve decision making with the Microsoft business intelligence integrated platform. Calculate and run simulation models on complex financial portfolios and trading scenarios, as well as analyze risks and profitability across portfolios, using Microsoft products like Microsoft Office Excel and Windows High-Performance Computing Server. |
Supporting technology: Analysts can use Excel 2007 to perform complex what-if scenarios. Windows HPC Server provides a cost-effective solution that helps firms run simulation models on complex financial portfolios and trading scenarios. Microsoft business intelligence offers a complete, fully integrated set of technologies that can help reduce the complexity of organizing and distributing information and enable better business decisions-all in a single, integrated platform. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 supports the rapid development of enterprise-class business applications that give financial users a critical competitive advantage and delivers rich data analysis and data-mining capabilities that integrate with familiar applications such as Microsoft Office. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services offers a comprehensive, server-based solution that includes traditional managed reports, interactive reports, and embedded reports. Reporting Services also includes Report Builder, a tool that helps securely connect business users to data so they can explore the relational data and create and update reports with ease. Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services provides a consistent set of key performance indicators and business metrics to all users. Integrated data mining enables predictive analysis so users can investigate common issues like forecasting and identifying key influencers for decisions. Users can increase the scale and performance of analysis by using enhanced analytical capabilities and complex computations and aggregations. Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, which builds on the capabilities of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and Microsoft Office Excel 2007, can help organizations manage all aspects of complex reporting by integrating monitoring, analysis, and planning into a single application
Increase operational efficiency | Business Challenge | Solution/Benefit |
|---|
To remain competitive, firms are expanding their investment geographies to new countries and broadening the range of assets in which they invest. Technology needs to be able to support the added volumes as well as the increasing complexities of the transactions involved. To perform these types of calculations, firms are buying software with built-in flexibility that they can leverage as trading algorithms change and that allows them to respond quickly as client or market requirements change. They don't want to buy specialized applications that will need to be replaced soon. And they're investing in solutions that scale to accommodate their growing client base and trading volumes. | Leveraging Microsoft's products, users can work with a familiar user interface, administrators can build on known administrative controls, and developers can work within a known developer framework. The integrated Microsoft platform supports all aspects of the trade cycle and helps investment firms achieve best execution, best pricing, and compliance. And it offers the security and ease of maintenance that is uniquely delivered by Microsoft. |
Supporting technology: Firms using Microsoft components running on the Windows operating system can be assured that all components are seamlessly integrated. Microsoft products, including Excel 2007, Windows HPC Server 2008, SharePoint Server, and Excel Services, can be used to perform risk analysis, manage enterprise content, and create a personalized portfolio portal. Users can collaborate and use search features. Excel Services can be linked to Windows HPC Server 2008 to render or display a high-quality spreadsheet in a dashboard or portal. For firms with disparate systems running on different platforms, Microsoft BizTalk Server provides the infrastructure to help financial institutions connect systems within and between organizations, regardless of the platform. Using BizTalk Server, firms can get more out of their current investments and minimize the cost of integrating new technology. BizTalk Server provides the ability to gather data from the edge of the enterprise, enabling real-time visibility across business processes and trading partners. Developers can use the .NET Framework to create and connect platform-independent applications and solutions. The .NET Framework development tools provide an open and familiar development environment that reduces development time and cost and provides visually stunning user experiences and seamless and security-enhanced communication capabilities. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) improves data visualization and allows users to view data in innovative new ways. To extend the reach of WPF to non-Windows-based environments, developers can use Silverlight, which is a cross-browser, cross-platform application.
|
|
