BST Awards 2020: Best overall buy-side product, 2020—Matrix IDM

There no free lunches in the fintech industry—it’s a veritable graveyard of failed startups. And yet for those firms able to genuinely solve widespread industry problems, the spoils can be substantial. Matrix IDM wins the best buy-side product for 2020, its third success of this year’s BST Awards after wins in the best IBOR and best newcomer (vendor or product) categories. The firm’s principals—Neil Lotter and Stuart Plane (both in Sydney), Rob Webber (in New York) and Mark Frampton (in London)—have an intimate understanding of what makes the buy side tick by virtue of their involvement in Cadis, one of the industry’s outstanding success stories and now part of IHS Markit after its 2012 acquisition by the information giant. 

Established in 2017, Matrix IDM was founded specifically to address a number of ongoing challenges in the AUD$3 trillion Australian superannuation market with its complicated funds structures and use of diverse asset classes. “We noticed that a lot of the problems associated with managing these [Australian superannuation] funds—performing asset allocations, managing exposures, complying with regulations and reporting to regulators—were not being solved by traditional software vendors,” explains Neil Lotter, CEO of Matrix IDM. “So the fundamental premise was to design some software and a service that sits alongside it to solve those problems.”  

According to Lotter, what differentiates Matrix IDM from other providers is its “holistic understanding” of its clients’ entire business and not just the investment side of their operations. “There’s a complex relationship between the products and the underlying investments and relationships with third parties that help to package up these investment products, and the differentiator is that we understand the breadth of our clients’ business and not just the investments,” he says. “It’s about products, operations, fees and the relationships they have with their customers and the regulators on the one hand, and with custodians, administrators and third-party managers on the other, and if you think about it, there’s an ecosystem where all those parties come together to deliver products to investors. The differentiator for us is that unlike a lot of applications or systems designed to target a part of that chain, we provide a platform that brings together features and bits of information from all of the above.” 

Past winners of this category include Advise Technologies (2012), LCH.Clearnet (2013), Vermilion Software (2014), Algomi (2015), Commcise (2016), Thasos Group (2017), Nasdaq (2018) and Quantifi (2019).