Investment Management Software

Buyers guide

Managing financial assets can be challenging for portfolio managers, independent traders, and private bankers due to the lack of timely access to data, changing market trends, complex risk analysis, and time-consuming calculations. Investment management software can help deal with these challenges by automating key functions such as portfolio management, asset reporting, and accounting.

However, picking the right investment management solution can be challenging: there's a diversity of solutions on the market and they differ in price, deployment options, and features. For instance, should you go with a cloud-based investment management solution, or is an on-premise one better for your business?

To help you decide, we've created this Buyers Guide that gives an overview of investment management software, its common features, and key considerations.

Here's what we'll cover:

What is investment management software?
Common features of investment management software
What type of buyer are you?
Key considerations

What is investment management software?

Investment management software helps manage investment portfolios, audit compliance, optimize portfolio performance, and track financial assets such as stocks, futures, options, and bonds. Some of its common features include asset reporting, portfolio management, and investment tracking. The users of investment management software include traditional investment management firms, independent traders and investment advisers, and vendors of alternative investment (such as hedge funds).

Common features of investment management software

Investment management software has a wide range of functionality such as investment tracking, portfolio performance, asset reporting, and benchmarking. Here are the common features of the software:

To further understand the features and benefits of investment management software, call our advisors at (855) 998-8505 for an obligation-free consultation. They will listen to your requirements and help you narrow down your options by recommending the best-suited software for you business needs.

What type of buyer are you?

These are the two broad categories of investment management software buyers:

• Independent professionals: These include individual traders and investment advisers. Independent traders are primarily involved in selling shares, bonds, and financial assets on behalf of their clients (individuals or banks), whereas independent investment advisers make investment recommendations and conduct security analysis.
• Firms: These include small, medium, and large investment firms. They manage portfolio investment management projects for wealthy individuals or corporations.

Features in the previous section are inherent to efficient investment management, thus relevant to both the buyer types. Businesses are advised to consult preferred vendors on their specific requirements such as level of support required, favorable price points, and data storage capacity.

Benefits of investment management software

By now you should have an idea about the benefits you can expect from investment management software, but we'll summarize them below:

• Improved decision making: The solution offers timely access to data via reports and dashboards to make informed investment decisions. It allows users to assess gaps in investments and track the performance of factors such as the debt-equity ratio to optimize investment plans. Further, users can also get live, daily, and monthly price updates of mutual funds, bonds, and stocks.
• Better risk management: The software leverages real-time asset reporting and diverse risk models to help identify assets prone to risks or low returns. This allows users to mitigate risk by balancing investments with safer and more rewarding ones.
• Easier portfolio management: The tool helps categorize and organize portfolios on a centralized platform. This makes accessing and sifting through them easier.

Key considerations

As the last step to purchasing investment management software, you need to keep a few additional things in mind.

• Deployment options: You can either go for a cloud-based solution or an on-premise one. The latter option requires higher upfront investment in acquiring and implementing the software and relevant infrastructure but doesn't incur recurring monthly/yearly subscription fees like could-based tools. On the other hand, cloud solutions can be used right away after paying the subscription fee, which make them favorable for independent professionals and small businesses.
• Scalability of the software: Irrespective of whether you're an independent trader or an investment firm of any size, scalability of the software should be a top priority. Check with the vendor if the software can accommodate your growing portfolio, relationships, investor base, prospect data, and scale for a mass market.
• Third-party integrations: This is particularly important for businesses as they use multiple software tools to support different aspects of their operations. Integrating the investment management software with tools such as online accounting software and financial CRM software will facilitate data exchange between these systems, thus saving time and effort on redundant data entries and possible errors in manually copying over data.

Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.