A nimble and scalable platform enabling growth
Many firms find themselves stuck in a legacy architecture where data and functionality are separated into silos, with complex integrations to connect these in workflows. This results in a large overhead that slows down change projects and limits the overall automation level feasibly achieved.
Adopting a modern open platform architecture will allow you to move away from slow and costly IT change projects and transition to an agile delivery model that lets you easily add new products, increase productivity, gain better oversight, and innovate – both at speed and scale.
Limina’s pioneering cloud-native open platform architecture - developed since 2014 and in production since 2015 - is optimised for delivering business value:
- Real-time views of data powered by an event-driven microservice architecture
- Powerful connectivity capabilities with full API coverage and configurable import engine, allowing for automation and/or extensions to workflows without custom code
- Cloud-native (which significantly reduces the IT footprint)
- Enables efficient outsourcing initiatives through flexible connectivity and by allowing the outsourced team to work in the same platform
- A unified and extensible data model that can be used to gather usable insights and power third party solutions without the risk of data discrepancy
Modern technology to empower a distributed workforce
The pandemic changed the role of technology in the operating model of investment managers. As many firms adopt a hybrid remote model in response to changed employee preferences, it presents a long-term challenge to ensure that processes remain efficient and robust. At the same time, a new generation of investment professionals is increasingly expecting more from their technology solutions. Therefore, empowering your team with modern technology will also be a key competitive advantage in the long-term recruitment and retention of talent.
Some examples of tangible benefits your team will see from using Limina’s cloud-native investment technology include:
- Accessing the system instantly wherever you are via a web browser (no more VPN!)
- Working efficiently with low-latency solutions that run just as fast on your old home laptop as your office workstation
- Viewing alerts on your phone in meetings or when traveling
Lower the cost of active management
Continuing fee pressure, increasing regulatory requirements, and investor demands for transparency and reporting are all positive challenges for the overall industry. It is forcing investment managers to do more - with less.
A big part of the solution can come by revising your technology landscape:
- True cloud technology provides a significant cost reduction compared to traditional solutions. More than just server and direct IT costs, the total cost of ownership of old technology is exacerbated by the resources needed to run these solutions due to their complex upgrade projects, BCP routines and more.
- Unlock exception-based workflows, where your team can focus on issue resolution and let the system handle issue identification. This is another way of saying: less manual tasks and more focus on investment returns
- Let the system quality control data for you (scroll down for more details…)
A unified and extensible data model to power your business
The benefit of a centralised data set, standardised across asset classes and functional areas, is fundamental to avoid data synchronisation issues (data gaps, timing issues, cost of maintenance). When properly implemented, the whole team, from portfolio managers and traders to compliance and operations, all see the same view at the same time.
For this to work in practice, a key requirement is that the data model is fit for purpose - for everyone in the team:
- Can the data be trusted (e.g., are there quality control processes in place including for proprietary data sets)?
- Can data be viewed in different states (e.g., confirmed vs. preliminary; pre-trade vs. settled)?
- Are data models data vendor agnostic, or is everyone enforced the same market data vendor regardless of what other solutions (e.g., terminals) they use?
- Can data be enriched to include information needed for the various teams? (e.g., analytics for portfolio managers, classifications for compliance rules, etc.)
- Are data models properly centralised or divided into silos, requiring inefficient collation to get to a full portfolio view (e.g., are there different definitions of a transaction depending on asset class)?
These considerations have been fundamental to how data models and APIs have been designed in Limina IMS. The result is a platform that is natively suitable to be the central source of truth to power use cases across the whole investment team.
Open platform architecture that fits into your partner ecosystem
At the core, Limina IMS is an open platform architecture that advocates connectivity and smooth end-to-end workflows, regardless of whether those workflows involve 3rd party solutions or not. Unlike closed-ended platforms, Limina IMS is not limited to any specific 3rd party solutions and does not enforce specific ones to be used. Instead, connectivity is a key component of the system design:
- Managed integrations - the platform contains managed, out-of-the-box connectivity towards our partner ecosystem, which includes many of the most popular industry solutions in market data, analytics, trading, and performance & risk solutions
- Configurable import & export - Limina IMS includes a unique configurable import/export application in which non-technical users can easily design integrations using intuitive drag & drop functionality to allow for automation of many workflows that traditionally have been manual (e.g., file-based integrations with in-house systems)
- APIs - the platform’s micro-service architecture exposes full API coverage (REST APIs for HTTP requests and WebSocket APIs for streaming data), enabling any data or actions within Limina to be integrated with or extended by outside solutions.
On top of integrations sits a data quality control framework that can be leveraged to monitor integrations from a timing and data quality perspective.
Limina fully manages all version upgrades. Each new version goes through the same robust staging process that involves extensive automated regression tests and manual quality assurance of new functionality by the Limina product team. As a client, you get access to new versions in a separate pre-production (stage) environment prior to its scheduled production release.
Limina also uniquely offers an enterprise SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, i.e. cloud solution) release cycle. This means that, unlike most SaaS offerings, we don’t enforce version upgrades on the same schedule to all our clients while still offering the benefits of a SaaS. For firms with strict change management policies, frequent (e.g., weekly) upgrades may be too often, which is why we also offer longer release cycles (e.g., quarterly or semi-annually) to individual clients. This is one manifestation of Limina’s belief that modern investment technology solutions should fit the client, not the other way around.
Here are some examples of how we work with security:
- Automated intelligent threat detection services from AWS
- Automated backup management, including redundant storage and encryption of all data at rest
- Managed services from AWS for general service availability (incl. database and network)
- Highly restricted access to servers (only the system administration team at Limina has access on a zero trust basis)
- Best-practice system architecture (multiple security layers)
- Advanced permission system in the application – granular permissions configured per user and/or user group level
- Audit trail for all data changes
- Compliant with GDPR
- Compliant with data locality requirements (e.g., EU data saved in EU data centers)
- Secure login: Two-factor authentication (2FA) or Single-Sign-On (SSO) can be enforced for the whole organisation
- HTTPS - Secure HTTP connections over TLS
With Limina’s SaaS solution, you don’t have to worry about hosting, which means there are no dependencies on hardware (servers, computers), network, or key person risk in the IT team on your side. An additional unique benefit of Limina IMS is that the system is fully browser-based. You can simply open the system on another device if your regular work computer isn’t working or is out of reach. Just open a web browser and log in - no updates, 3rd party software, or VPN solutions necessary!
High system availability
Forget about designing failover routines, configuring redundant hardware, and carrying out disaster recovery testing of your investment management technology. With Limina IMS, you get a system that is designed from the ground up to provide unrivaled uptime and built-in automatic failover.
This is possible thanks to the system’s micro-services architecture and cloud orchestration technology that ensures that individual small components are restarted automatically in case of any issues - without affecting the rest of the system.
Elastic scaling & automatic load balancing
Leveraging AWS, Limina IMS is hosted on elastic cloud computation clusters that automatically scale up available resources to ensure high performance regardless of server load. In addition, our exclusive hosting model (multi-instance rather than multi-tenant) gives each client its own private virtual cluster, which further minimises the risk of heavy performance load by another client affecting you.
Low latency
Limina IMS can be hosted on any AWS data center globally, ensuring low latency regardless of where in the world your HQ is located. Furthermore, all processing is done server-side, which keeps the data traffic and requirements on the local device to a minimum. That’s why you most likely won’t notice a drop in performance if you’re using the system on a touchpad on a 4G hotspot compared to your regular workstation in the office.
Tested disaster recovery
Limina has a tested contingency plan, in the unlikely event of an entire AWS data center or region going down, that ensures minimal service disruption and data loss.
Don’t Just Take Our Word for It
See for yourself how Limina’s investment management software can meet your business’s unique challenges and needs. Click below to book your free demo now.
