In this interview, Gus Sekhon, our head of product, sits down with Aviva Investors’ Michelle Calcutt and Andrew Morrison to talk all things customer experience related. Michelle heads up the client experience team at Aviva Investors and is responsible for the end-to-end client journey, the interactions they have and how to improve this. Andrew is head of client experience enablement and is focused on delivering this change. Our discussion was inspired by a recent Aviva Investors whitepaper – The CX Factor.

On July 13, 2020 the Bank of England (BoE) published its ‘Libor: Entering the Endgame’ speech by Governor, Andrew Bailey, where the importance of transitioning off the London InterBank Offer Rate (LIBOR) was again emphasised.  

Investment fund infrastructure has not typically been optimised for the rapid exchange of information, but rather for functionality around a narrow set of instruments, vendor services and third-party administrators.

During the last three months, we’ve welcomed ten new joiners to FINBOURNE whilst operating remotely. Here’s what we’ve learned over the lockdown period about what is, even in normal times, such a vital and interpersonal experience to get right. We discuss how we help people to connect, maintain our culture, develop relationships and retain focus on our goals. We include feedback from line managers and new joiners, and what we’ve changed in our processes.

In today’s interview, Dermot Shortt, FINBOURNE Chairman and Rebecca Ross in our Marketing team sit down with Olivia Vinden, Alpha FMC’s Head of Fintech and Innovation. We discuss automation, how buyside firms are using data analytics in distribution as well as their investment processes and why ecosystems are so important today.

In the first of our FINBOURNE interviews series, Dermot Shortt, FINBOURNE Chairman sits down with David Pierson, Director, OMBA Advisory & Investments. They discuss OMBA’s relentless focus on efficiency and automation in building a low fee scalable business which grew revenue by 670% last year, the industry challenges he sees around data quality, how OMBA is tackling the investment platform problem, and solving build versus buy.

At FINBOURNE we run highly available Kubernetes clusters in multiple availability zones, with about twenty-five M5.2xLarge nodes per cluster. These nodes live within an Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and although they are not physically linked, they can communicate. We use WeaveNet as our overlay network to secure our cluster traffic with encryption within a VPC. WeaveNet (Weave or commonly known as weave) gives us confidence that pod traffic is not being intercepted or manipulated between nodes; deploying WeaveNet as a Daemonset means that we can manage configuration in a single place. This configuration is deployed through our CICD systems from a central repository. We maintain the capability to update low-level components without triggering an outage by implementing an immutable infrastructure pattern.

When you create your very own LUSID tenant via our Early Access Program we want it to be as easy as possible for you to start using LUSID.

Last week we held a webcast with The Trade where we did something we think is unusual: we defined an Investment Book of Record (IBOR). Not by what it is - that’s a fairly commonplace categorisation - but by what it does. Or rather, what it should do to be a relevant and productive tool in today’s landscape of systemic margin compression, increasingly exigent regulatory bodies and historic market dislocations.

Strange Hanging of Python Client

We've gone to a lot of trouble here at FINBOURNE to make life easy for our customers by using technology in innovative ways.

Often seen as a reliable tool that sits on every trader’s desktop, the Order Management System (OMS) has been a core part of investment operations for years. Yet we regularly talk to buy-side firms who think about retiring their OMS and replacing it with an internally built database or another tool. In this piece we look at how the concept of the OMS became popular, what problems it sought to address, how today’s complex investment environment is testing the capabilities of the OMS and the alternative solutions available.

"You should work from home unless it is impossible for you to do so"

Last week, I spoke on a panel at the HFM European Technology Summit about the future of hedge fund technology. A great event and opportunity to hear first-hand from hedge fund CTOs the issues impacting their technology teams and areas of focus for this year. Here's a summary and our take on the topics discussed.

This blog post is the fourth in a series in which I integrate all of my personal financial accounts with LUSID - our open, API-first, developer friendly investment data platform - to get a comprehensive picture of my net worth. In this post I will demonstrate the benefit of having integrated financial data from four different sources including:

1. A Monzo Current Account
2. A Vanguard ISA account
3. An AMEX Credit Card
4. An Australian Pension Fund (*this blog post)

As it comes to the end of the year, we’ve taken a few minutes to look back on on 2019 – what we’ve achieved and where to for Team FINBOURNE next year. None of this would be possible without the support of our awesome employees, clients, partners and investors. A huge thank you to everyone who has been involved, not just in 2019 but for the last three years – what a journey so far.

TraderMade, a market leading vendor of FX research, data and charting applications, has signed a partnership with FINBOURNE Technology to make its data available on LUSID, the open investment data platform. TraderMade data is available without charge as part of the 90 day free evaluation period available to all clients that sign up to LUSID.

This blog post is the third in a series in which I integrate all of my personal financial accounts with LUSID  - our open, API-first, developer friendly investment data platform - to get a comprehensive picture of my net worth.

Doing this allows me to aggregate my financial information in one place, perform powerful analysis and get a clearer picture of what I own, and what I owe.

We’re stoked to win ‘Best Buyside Newcomer’ at Waters’ Buy-Side Technology Awards for LUSID, our open,  API-first and developer friendly investment data platform.

Last week the Bank of England (BoE) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released the results of their Machine learning in UK financial services joint survey. The paper confirmed what most of us already know, which is that machine learning (ML) is being used increasingly in the investment management industry. But it also confirmed a lesser talked about fact - legacy systems and data limitations are major barriers to implementing an effective machine learning strategy. In this blog post, we explore how the right technology can help investment managers overcome these barriers.

This blog post is the second in a series in which I integrate each of my personal financial accounts with our investment data platform LUSID to get a comprehensive picture of my net worth. Doing this allows me to aggregate my financial information in one place, perform powerful analysis and get a clearer picture of what I own, and what I owe.

Increasingly diversified investment strategies, closure of mutual funds, the rise of passively managed funds and companies racing to consolidate. It’s easy to say the asset management industry is slow to change but when you look at it from the outside, it’s being pummelled by change in all directions.

This blog post is part of a series in which I’m going to integrate each of my personal financial accounts with LUSID to get a comprehensive picture of my net worth. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but never had the tools to achieve.

In the first of our series of posts looking at what life is like at FINBOURNE HQ - Daria Deluermoz, one of our first graduate hires - talks through her route to FINBOURNE, her first few months in the job and what a typical day looks like.

This post is the second in a series looking at investment data management topics that come up regularly in our work with fund managers.

We’re a data driven company, we rank topics for this blog series using a system of up-/down-voting across all of our teams. One topic that was consistently upvoted was this one: "What is the true value of your IBOR (Investment Book of Record)?" But is that the right question to be asking?

While retail banks have mostly been dragged kicking and screaming into the UK government-backed Open Banking initiative, the fund investment industry should treat it as an opportunity to remove unnecessary cost, connect more closely with their customers and build better services.

Let’s have a look at three distinct lessons we've learned from Open Banking that could be applied to the investment industry.

The incoming Chief Data Officer (CDO) is transitioning into the organisation. His predecessor is "seeking exciting new opportunities outside the organisation". On his way out after the handover week the outgoing CDO hands his replacement three numbered envelopes. "Each time things get tough", he says, "open one of these envelopes."

When you decide to implement any new investment management software you need to have access to sources of market data. Before you can even begin evaluating the technology’s core functionality,  you need to source, licence, load and operate market data feeds for security static data, prices and corporate actions. That’s a lot of work before you even start testing and reviewing.

We've been in stealth mode for a while busily building LUSID and now we're ready to release our Early Access Program (EAP). Here are all the questions you might have about LUSID and some (hopefully) helpful answers. If there’s anything we haven’t addressed, please get in touch and we’ll do our best to answer.

This is the first in a series of posts looking at some of the questions we’re regularly asked about improving the investment data management process. Today we’re looking at reconciliations.

In April 2017, we were the first company to move into the Rise London fintech building. Our rapidly expanding team meant that we undertook three office moves within the building and after moving from the fifth to the third and finally to the first floor, gaining our own much used meeting room and enjoying all the facilities Rise offered, the time came for us to move on.

We spoke at a recent cloud technology event run by Velocity, the FinTech innovation hub and accelerator of the Investment Association. Chris Brook, one of our founders and senior engineers, spoke on a panel with AWS, Schroders and Hentsū  about the drivers, barriers and opportunities that present through cloud based infrastructure. They discussed:

On a recent cycle ride, a fellow cyclist asked me what FINBOURNE does. Before I could reply a friend interjected with “FINBOURNE is building a ‘Strava’ for investment data”.

We are delighted to announce a partnership with Thomson Reuters who will be using our cloud based advanced investment management platform, LUSID^®, for its client and transaction data. Our 18 month anniversary has just passed, so what better way to celebrate than to partner with the world’s leading source of news and information for professional markets.

We read with interest a recent survey released by Alpha FMC revealing that asset managers see digital transformation as a top priority but two-thirds are slowed down by legacy systems and culture clashes.

At FINBOURNE, we are proud to work with some of the world’s leading asset managers and servicers who are pushing the boundaries of innovation, challenging the status quo and using technology as a real driver in helping transform their businesses.

Everyone knows that data is important, but do we really appreciate how important access to correct data is for the successful execution of an investment strategy?

Bitemporal data is a fundamental principle in our LUSID platform, yet the term is not very common amongst technologists nor business users. It can be a complex concept to describe, and I've been thinking of a simple example to help illustrate it…

FINBOURNE Technology launches LUSID™ a revolutionary replacement software system for the asset management industry.

Huge amounts of money are being spent on bolt-on regulatory technology. Why don’t we embrace the capabilities of our digital infrastructure and allow the data required by regulation to be gathered as part of the core business process. I worry that a lot of the RegTech industry is just barking up the wrong tree.

In our last piece, we said we would talk more about “transactions” being the meta-solution to a swathe of investment industry challenges. We hope this post sheds some more light on what we have been working on and how it could make your life as an investment professional easier.

A big part of our story at Finbourne is maintaining an open communications channel with our customers, our partners and the community in general. Over the course of a vast numbers of discussions, meetings and validation sessions, we’ve identified some common themes of interest and pain that I want to

During the first quarter of 2017, European asset managers enjoyed inflows of EUR210bn - the highest in 5 years. This is great news and points to a wider theme that governments around the world are shifting responsibility for savings and retirement to the private sector – all good for investment managers.

Today we moved into our brand new office. We are proud to be the first tenants in the new Barclays RISE building in Shoreditch. Within hours of our arrival we started to feel the benefits of being part of a wider Fintech ecosystem... Seems RISE are happy too!

using nginx and oauth2_proxy to deliver S3 based content (and azure blob store)

tl;dr

• Making oauth2_proxy work with nginx, and redirecting the output was hard.
• It is possible to have an oauth2 authenticated website that serves static content from Azure Blob Stores, or S3 buckets.

S3 static sites

AWS S3 buckets allows you to serve up static html as a website

tl;dr

• Introducing the concourse.ci metadata resource
• https://github.com/finbourne/concourse-metadata-resource
• https://hub.docker.com/r/finbourne/concourse-metadata-resource/
• it's not a long post - go read it.

A useful little resource

We love Concourse. In the past I've worked a lot with TeamCity, and although it's a fantastic piece of kit, it doesn't fit our CI/CD needs as well as

Azure currently has some pretty interesting rules and restrictions around how things can be named. At times they seem arbitrary, but none-the-less, it’s what we have to work with.

What follows is a copy and paste from our internal wiki, explaining our strategy to naming in Azure. We’ve posted them

Identity Providers

Having spent the last 15 years cossetted in the big corporate world blissfully unaware of just how complex managing Identity and access control actually is, I can best describe my journey of the last month as enlightening. Emboldened by our mission and with the idea that we were