SimCorp back to its winning ways

SimCorp won Best buy-side investment book of record (Ibor) platform in this year’s Buy‑Side Technology Awards, a category it has won on several occasions since 2010. Christian Kromann, CEO of SimCorp, discusses what separates the firm’s Ibor from other similar offerings across the buy side, and its foundational role in the creation of the firm’s recently unveiled investment management platform, SimCorp One.

Congratulations on SimCorp’s recent success in a category it has won several times in the past. What do you believe differentiates SimCorp’s Ibor from other similar offerings in what is a mature and highly competitive market?   

Christian Kromann: In reality, building an Ibor is what we’ve been doing for years—that’s the whole idea that started SimCorp many years ago. That fundamental philosophy of having a real-time view of your positions has always driven us as a company. As the world has become more complex and our customers are making more sophisticated investments, we needed to make sure that our Ibor was not only able to fundamentally capture the whole investment universe, but also cater for more complex data structures, and so on. What continues to set us apart is that our Ibor is real time, it’s all data, and it’s all asset classes. We have always stayed true to that philosophy and it’s great to be recognized again for continuing down that path.

Let’s talk a bit about the SimCorp One platform. What role did the Ibor play in the creation of SimCorp One, and what other SimCorp products have been folded into the platform that makes it so compelling from the end-user’s perspective? 

Christian Kromann: This year we have rolled out a full-blown launch of SimCorp One, which is, essentially, the entire capabilities of what SimCorp offers the buy side. That is underpinned by the Ibor and, to a certain extent, its sister, the accounting book of record. That’s the data, that’s the platform and that is what makes everything else work. On top of that, we perform client reporting—allowing our clients to communicate with their clients. We also do data management services, which we added to the lineup some years back and the big news this year is the addition of Axioma to the SimCorp family, which now allows us to offer optimization and sophisticated risk capabilities.

Also included in SimCorp One is the link to what we call the SimCorp partner ecosystem. We have around 130 technology firms connected seamlessly to the platform, which ultimately allows our clients to tap into all the innovation—from small, nimble firms to large well-recognized technology firms. All of that is underpinned by the Ibor. That’s the entire justification for why SimCorp One exists—it’s the start point and end point of what we do, and it provides the buy side with a comprehensive value proposition, offering them all of the constituents I’ve just described.

Casting our minds forward, what is in the offing from SimCorp in terms of new features and functions? What is on your release radar that SimCorp is looking to fold into the Ibor, and how might those enhancements impact users of the platform on a day-to-day basis?   

Christian Kromann: Let’s start with SimCorp’s technology vision. Once again, having an Ibor with the comprehensive capabilities we have allows us to innovate on top of that Ibor. The way we do that is by building out contained and nimble cloud-native applications that have very specific use-cases—typically those that present users with large computational challenges, which is where the cloud comes into play.

A great example is full performance attribution calculations, which are typically quite comprehensive [and therefore compute-intensive]. We can now perform those calculations intraday because we’re taking full advantage of the Ibor, which is already real time and uses the cloud to manage those processes. Basically, we innovate on top of all the capabilities the Ibor already presents.

No technology discussion these days would be complete without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI). Where is SimCorp right now in its AI journey? 

Christian Kromann: Correct. This would be a strange conversation if we didn’t mention AI. That’s front and center of what we’re doing right now. Over the past couple of years, AI has gone from something people talked about to something people actually now do. There are real use-cases and business cases out there. We’re incorporating AI in a few different ways. We’re building copilots into all the cloud-native capabilities we’ve already developed, which accelerates the user experience.

We’re also starting to put more analytical AI into optimizing our various workflows. It’s important to note that we are still dealing with a world in which there are fee pressures and firms need to optimize [their technology and various business processes].

The delivery options for the Ibor are therefore really important in this context. All of our new clients pretty much take the software-as-a-service version, but we still allow our clients to move along that value chain in terms of how it fits into their specific timelines.

Finally, we have added what we call business services, where we operate either the entire Ibor or parts of the Ibor on behalf of our clients. Again, we’re innovating on top of our own capabilities.

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