Indata Sees Greater Buy-Side Adoption of Cloud-based Portfolio Management System (Q&A)

Indata has announced that GW Capital will use its cloud-based iPM solution for portfolio management. The Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, which manages more than $2 billion, chose Indata for its ability to manage fixed-income securities and for its cost-saving disaster recovery capabilities.

Buy-Side Technology spoke with David Csiki, Indata's managing director, about the product, the latest trends in cloud computing, and what's on Indata's IT roadmap.

Buy-Side Technology: What is Indata's iPM solution?
David Csiki: The iPM platform was launched in February 2010. It is a portfolio management application, but it also contains functions for trade order management—accounting, billing, reporting and performance. It's a front-to-back solution for an investment management firm. We only focus on the buy-side segment of the industry.

What makes iPM unique is that it contains a couple of different functions that were traditionally separate from a portfolio management system. It has a data management engine that proactively monitors all the data in the system to make sure it is accurate. If there's an issue or if data has changed or gone stagnant, the system will reach out to whoever it is set up to reach out to in order to let them know there's potentially an issue.

The iPM platform integrates what was traditionally a separate data management function that only a large sell-side firm would use, such as in a data warehousing solution.

BST: How have feelings about cloud computing changed on the buy side? Where do you see most interest? Where is there resistance?
Csiki: The cloud part of our solution was launched in June 2011, so it's a relatively new offering. The resistance was initially due to a lack of understanding of the cloud. When people think of the cloud they think of Amazon or Microsoft. But what we're doing differently with the cloud for financial services is offering a private cloud. Money managers have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their clients’ data, so they really can't throw it up on Amazon.

Also, clients have their own dedicated, physical server or equipment so that data is not commingled. The reason some people resist going into the cloud is because some offerings have a multi-tenant model, such as SalesForce.com. This is OK as long as it's not mission-critical data—for example, if it's just contacts, that's fine. But portfolio data is sensitive.

BST: Do you have any plans for future iPM enhancements or releases that you can tell us about?
Csiki: We're about two years into this and so far we've done functional releases of the system. We've improved our reconciliation software, performance, compliance and our rules libraries. The future releases will be focused on continuing those different parts of the system. So, for example, we're focusing on customer-relationship management (CRM) and contact management.