Private and Institutional Banking are growth businesses whose impressive returns on investment are considerably higher than those of comparable banking sectors. Challenging markets, rising competition, increased regulations and customer sophistication are some of the most important trends influencing the way in which business is carried out. To keep ahead of the competition while maintaining high profit levels, financial institutions today need to provide a high level of personalised services, above average returns and competitive conditions to retain existing and attract new customers.
In a rapidly changing environment, simple tools that provide basic functions are no longer enough. The biggest constraints in adapting to new business models are often the legacy processes and systems that were built for a previous era.
Investment in new generation front office solutions is one of the key
factors that can help financial institutions achieve their goals. The
modern day solution not only reflects the diversity demanded of the financial
markets, but is also modelled on providing high value client service,
centralised management of invest-ment strategies and automated processing
of the transaction life cycle.
With tools that allow orga-nisations to achieve more with less effort,
some of the most obvious benefits of your investment can be seen in the
areas of staff productivity and client satisfaction.
Building on the success of its market-leading solutions, Odyssey now delivers the Portfolio Manager Workstation.
The Portfolio Manager Workstation is designed to be used by portfolio managers within a front and middle-office environment, enabling them to better manage investments. The solution empowers users to automate the investment process, ensuring that the investment professional is focused on “exception management” and value-added client services rather than being restricted by the need to deal with routine processes or administrative procedures.
There are several general benefits derived from the state-of-the-art design of our solutions, including:
Architecture
The ‘event-driven’ and ‘push-oriented’ architecture of the Portfolio Manager Workstation is extremely powerful in the context of Order Generation and Compliance.
These business components are underpinned by a key technical element, referred to as HEART (the High Efficiency and Availability Real-Time layer). HEART has three main characteristics – it offers a high level of availability, gives access to real-time information and can alert users as events occur. Technically, HEART consists of a series of services around an in-memory cache providing real-time data availability on an event-driven basis.
The constant availability of real-time information on portfolios’ current market value, as well as the compliance checking of clients relative to their respective targets facilitates a pro-active style of management. Any order initiated, individual or multiple, can be pre-validated and portfolio managers notified immediately by the system of any significant event. This cache-based design is particularly suited to large volume processing.
Web Browser User Interface
Our simple and intuitive user interface is particularly suitable for many key Portfolio Manager functions. In addition, Web-based user interfaces are invariably associated with lower costs of ownership and more efficient deployment through organisations. Typically, the most significant gains are achieved through centralised administration, elimination of leased lines for remote users and lower training overheads.
It is possible to use our Portfolio Manager Workstation as a unified
environment, providing not only access to the functions described here
but also to legacy applications (such as back office systems) and third
party services. In addition, and respecting such rich content, it is possible
to fully define application pageflows and workflows to suit the various
user profiles required within an organisation.