Limina IMS is a cross-asset transaction-based platform that includes a feature-rich OMS and a real-time IBOR. It’s designed and built from the ground up since 2014, in the cloud and browser from day one. This is in opposition to legacy tools and systems, that are often used as the core of “new” platforms, which brings their silo-based and scalability issues with them.
The Limina IMS provides your whole team with a complete and accurate real-time view of data (current, forward-looking, and historical) when and where you need it – that is: embedded into the investment lifecycle.
Empower your team - with exceptional modern technology
When combining the power of traditional solutions with the speed and intuitiveness that now are expected from modern web-based solutions, Limina offers your team:
- Complete, accurate and real-time data – so your cash and portfolios are always right
- Flexible - yet intuitive - solutions for complex workflows. Our microservices architecture and full API coverage unlock unlimited potential for extending and/or replacing specific workflows, without the scalability and upgrade issues caused by custom code
- A fully web-based product – i.e. access your workflows and accurate data from anywhere and any device
- Fast and easy access to new functionality with our frequent and fully managed upgrades
- Superior security and reliability
Working with your existing solutions
While our platform is independent and doesn’t rely on using any specific third parties, we do have an extensive ecosystem of partners and pre-built integrations to many of the most popular services used by asset management firms:
- Extensive workflow and data integrations with terminal solutions and market data providers, such as Bloomberg and Infront
- Integrations with prominent EMS solutions and outsourced trading providers, such as Bloomberg EMSX & TSOX and CF Global
- Out-of-the-box connectivity to performance and risk solutions
- Integrated analytics from companies such as Bloomberg; natively connected in portfolio views and order raising workflows
- Extensive custody and fund accounting integrations
An open platform - easy to extend and integrate
Limina IMS is developed on an event-based, micro-services cloud technology platform. It’s designed as an API-first open platform, making the product easy to extend and integrate with third-party solutions and data, with embedded data quality controls to ensure data quality and consistency.
This approach also allows for quick and low-risk phased implementations since some functional areas can initially remain separate and become integrated over time.
”Within our 2021 survey, 56% of the survey respondents saw ‘flexibility’ as the primary driver for cloud adoption. Cost and speed didn’t really factor in. The cloud is offering more optionality to investment management firms.”
Dave Nathan, former Associate Director, Alpha FMC (now head of change, Fidelity International)
Supported by a team that understands you
Each member of our customer success team has hands-on experience from asset management firms. You’ll have a dedicated cross-functional team at Limina who’ll get to know you and stay with you. Our team will work together with you on everything, from the initial setup to questions arising in production.
We’re passionate about helping you get the most out of the solution, and are continually gathering feedback to improve the product. Our aim is to work in close collaboration with our clients, to the point that we essentially become an extension to your own team.
“One of the most surprising and overwhelmingly positive learnings has been the collaborative atmosphere catalysed by the transition. We have established a relationship with Limina that is imbued with regular feedback, collaboration, and a test-and-learn approach. Alquity has benefited tremendously from the system being adapted to our needs, from being listened to and from beta-style testing.”
Liam Kelly, Head of Operations, Alquity Investment Management
Move quickly, with complete control
When managing orders, efficiency and confidence in decision-making is crucial. Limina IMS provides you with intuitive and streamlined workflows that help you get the job done quickly - regardless of asset class or style of investing:
- Flexible portfolio rebalancing to easily adjust inflows, against model or re-allocating
- Quick order entry with quantity calculators and multi-entity allocation
- Program trading (incl. import list from external systems)
- Option/future strategies
- Add/unwind from portfolio view
By balancing ease of use and flexibility, we have carefully designed these workflows to work intuitively out of the box but still be possible to tweak to your preferences:
- Configurable order parameter rules to save time when entering orders
- “What If” checks to see impact on cash and compliance before committing
- Fast compliance checks that are seamlessly integrated in the order raising process, with workflows to manage exceptions
- Configurable permissions and four-eye controls
Example: Portfolio rebalancing
Rebalance whole portfolios efficiently against models with a powerful iterative workflow to manage exceptions, and run simulated compliance checks to ensure that the program doesn’t breach any compliance rules:
Example: Quick order entry
Create orders at speed with complete control with quantity calculators, order parameter automation rules, and seamless compliance checks
Example: OTC trading
Flexible workflows for OTC derivatives leveraging Bloomberg tools such as OVML
A multi-asset platform – capable of scaling with your business
“Make sure everything runs like clockwork and be ready for my every move.”
Job description from George Soros to his CTO Ulf Svensson (Limina’s CRO) in 1993 – you can read the full story here. This is as true today as it was back then.
By partnering with Limina, you get a platform that can handle your investment strategies both today and in the future.
Limina IMS was designed from the ground up as a cross-asset platform. By not being burdened with old-school silos of asset-classes, functional modules or technical limitations, we provide inherently cross-asset solutions with workflows that are designed end to end to provide an excellent user experience regardless of investment strategy.
For example, all workflows and screens are cross-asset but change dynamically to show the relevant information for each asset where applicable, which reduces the learning curve while still providing the tools suitable for the job. In addition, pricing and analytics can be sourced from external providers of your choice to ensure that best-of-breed data can be utilised.
Be up and running quickly with managed trading integrations
Limina IMS includes numerous order integrations across different asset classes that we manage fully for you, making sure they are always live. Examples of out-of-the-box integrations include:
- Bloomberg trading solutions
- Direct broker connections
- Outsourced trading provider integrations
- OTC derivatives workflows via file-based workflows
- Fund trading integrations
Fast and effortless compliance
Pre-trade compliance is seamlessly integrated with the order-raising workflows, including intuitive workflows for viewing rule usage and managing breaches. The same quality controlled data and engine is used through “what if” scenarios, pre-trade checks and post-trade, making sure you have consistency between the various compliance controls.
The rules engine comes pre-configured with a large number of standard template rules (incl. UCITS). In addition, it can be extended with custom rules such as concentration limits, restricted lists, and cash ladder checks so you can trade with the confidence that no regulatory or internal rules will be breached.
A turnkey, best-in-class solution powered by Qontigo
Through our partnership with Qontigo, you can leverage the sophisticated Axioma Risk and performance attribution solutions to assess and improve your investment strategy. Capabilities include:
- A suite of risk analytics tailored to meet portfolio and asset specific risk measurement needs
- Flexible Factor Modelling:
- Full repricing with Historical and Monte Carlo simulations for risk measurement
- Axioma factor models available for risk decomposition across equities, fixed income (both interest and credit), commodities, macroeconomic factors
- A sophisticated stress testing framework
- Flexible performance attribution:
- Factor-based or Brinson-style attribution, allowing you to choose the approach that is most relevant to your investment style.
- Ability to evaluate returns on a risk-adjusted basis, providing additional insight into your portfolio’s performance relative to risks.
Delivered as an embedded offering, Limina seamlessly feeds quality controlled IBOR data into the Axioma solution - providing several key benefits that can otherwise be challenges for standalone solutions:
- Confidence in that the portfolio data used for risk and performance attribution is of high quality (correct, complete and timely)
- Fewer vendor relationships to manage (supported by Limina)
- Quick to get started since no additional integrations are needed
The Investment Book of Records (IBOR) concept was popularised a decade ago, and the benefits of establishing one are clear:
- Improved basis for decision-making
- Operational efficiency
- Avoidance of compliance issues from different teams looking at disjointed data sets
- Golden data source to power other in-house or external solutions
Despite these apparent benefits, we have seen two factors holding back mass adoption of standalone IBORs
- Without combining an IBOR with functional capabilities, the business case is not as obvious, and hence many have opted not to start projects in the first place
- For many investment managers that have embarked on IBOR initiatives, it has proven difficult to reach the expected ROI due to implementations being complex, costly, and insufficiently integrated into the core workflows of the firm.
While there are no solutions in the market today that fully deliver the vision outlined by the IBOR Standards Working Group, Limina's platform already satisfies many of the key requirements defined in the standard, and offers live extract capabilities within a modern and impressive architecture. Limina are committed to extend their IBOR capabilities over time, and, to date, have delivered to their commitments.
Ian Hunt, co-author of the IBOR Standards Working Group paper
Limina IMS address both challenges, with the benefits natively integrated into the core workflows of the Front and Middle Office. This is made possible through the platform being designed from the ground up as a service-based architecture with an IBOR at the heart that powers the workflows in order management, compliance, risk and performance attribution, rather than these being separate products. This means that many common issues, such as mapping of instrument definitions, reconciliation of quotes and valuation policies, and expensive bespoke integrations between the IBOR and the functional solutions such as the OMS are not needed since they are already natively combined, working off the same data.
A clear view of positions and cash
Regardless of your investment strategy, it's fundamental to have a clear real-time view of cash and positions.
Specifically: without an accurate, forward-looking view of cash, firms may be forced to keep cash buffers to protect themselves against overdrafts.
In today’s reality of ever-increasing fee pressure, every basis point counts – so don’t lose out on valuable performance from not being able to be fully invested.
To help you with this, Limina IMS provides a forward-looking cash ladder with several key capabilities:
- Detailed states to see and/or remove impact from orders depending on their status (e.g., pre-trade, working, executed, or allocated), with cash impact determined by order limit prices or market quotes
- Projected cash impact of floating rate coupons and dividend payments prior to ex-date
- Ability to include preliminary cash records such as future management fee payments
- Integration with rebalancing workflows to see detailed cash impact prior to raising orders
Complete time-series data to support performance, risk, and business intelligence
Limina IMS offers a consolidated source of real-time investment data, including bitemporal time-series data (“as at” and “as of”), with full audit and permission controls. This makes it suitable as a golden source of portfolio data for investment managers, which can power other solutions such as performance and risk management systems, business intelligence platforms and reporting solutions.
Decrease operational risk with Shadow NAV
Limina’s Shadow NAV functionality lets you run independent controls of the NAV your fund administrator produces, including support for NAV per share for share classes.
Flexible data models
The data models in Limina IMS are carefully designed to be suitable for investment management use cases - simplifying setup and mapping with other systems - while still providing flexibility in enriching with any custom data fields.
As an example, the security master in Limina IMS is market data vendor-agnostic, with an extensive number of out-of-the-box integrations fully managed by Limina. The security master can be extended upon with custom fields, as well as validation rules, to ensure that your firm’s view of required and optional fields are met.
Some of the use cases where this comes in handy are:
- When efficiently setting up bespoke compliance rules leveraging external 3rd party data (ESG and risk classifications, 3rd party analytics etc.)
- When setting up and trading new instruments, even when they’re not yet available at your market data provider
- When overruling your market data provider in cases where you disagree with their data (e.g. issuer data on specific small cap or emerging market stocks)
- When enriching transactions with data needed in downstream reporting solutions
Configurable connectivity
In addition to the extensive out-of-the-box integrations available, Limina IMS also comes with powerful custom connectivity capabilities for both import and export use cases, allowing you to integrate with in-house and 3rd party platforms easily.
Limina’s unique user-configurable import/export application allows for easy configuration of data integrations to and from the platform - without requiring technical expertise. The intuitive user experience allows your domain experts (e.g., middle office) to smoothly set up their own imports of data, such as cash records, index constituents, model portfolio weights, and ESG classifications. By giving these capabilities to the domain experts, it allows for:
- Greatly accelerated time-to-market due to no IT resource dependencies, as well as no “lost in translation” issues when converting business requirements to technical designs
- Higher overall automation level since integrations that otherwise wouldn’t be feasible due to the IT cost now can be set up with a few clicks of a button
- Remove dependency on the vendor to maintain and/or change integrations
In addition, Limina IMS’s API-first design has full API coverage, allowing any bespoke integrations to be built on top of the platform.
Example: import instrument ESG classifications from in-house analytics platform
ESG data has historically been – and still is – subject to much debate in the investment community. The lack of standardisation and varying quality on specific measurements by different data providers across various markets drives many leading sustainability-focused investment managers to take their own consolidated view of ESG data, aggregated from multiple data providers and curated with their research.
Ideally, this data should also be made available directly in the investment workflows. However, such an in-house integration to the OMS would typically require expensive client-specific development by the OMS vendor or an in-house IT project. But with Limina IMS, you can move from idea to production in a matter of minutes.
Confidence that your investment decisions are based on quality data
Your firm’s investment decisions are only as good as the quality of the data they’re based on.
For an investment management platform, this requires data to be:
- Complete: Limina IMS is a transaction-based system, meaning there are no dependencies on overnight batch processes to correct cash and positions related to investments. Non-trading related records and events (including fee accruals, cash transfers, and position lifecycle events) are fully tracked, ensuring that your whole portfolio is accurately represented at all times.
- Accurate: Custom validation rules and automated data quality control checks ensure that data issues are identified and flagged early on. This, combined with exception-based workflows, ensures that your team can spend their valuable time on resolving issues proactively rather than reactively.
- Timely: In time-critical situations, as the case often is in investment workflows, it doesn’t matter if the data is perfect - if it is not available when you need it. Limina IMS is natively a real-time system with no silos between modules, which means that data is readily available in real-time across the whole system, with no dependencies on batch processes.
Decrease operational risk with automated data governance solutions
Remove bottlenecks in investment processes, spot issues early on before they cause problems, and free up valuable time for your team with automated data governance solutions. Limina IMS includes many automated control checks for common data issues, such as pricing issues, missing instrument setup, unprocessed orders, cash import delays, reconciliation breaks, and more.
In addition, data governance is built into key workflows, allowing for optional additional control steps (e.g., four-eye approval) when creating orders, setting up instruments, and approving transaction details ahead of affirmation/matching.
Enrich data models to see the information you need, when you need it
Limina IMS has been carefully designed with flexible data models, allowing investment managers to add information, such as analysis data, ESG data, risk classifications and more, and see it in the native portfolio views. This saves the need to set up separate data lakes or warehouses for many use cases, and allows for incorporating the data into workflows, for instance as part of pre-trade compliance checks.
Using our configurable connectivity engine, a lot of the heavy-lifting is saved by automating the imports – without any IT resources necessary.
Configurable connectivity
In addition to the extensive out-of-the-box integrations available, Limina IMS also comes with powerful custom connectivity capabilities for both import and export use cases, allowing you to integrate with in-house and 3rd party platforms easily.
Limina’s unique user-configurable import/export application allows for easy configuration of data integrations to and from the platform - without requiring technical expertise. The intuitive user experience allows your domain experts (e.g., middle office) to smoothly set up their own imports of data, such as cash records, index constituents, model portfolio weights, and ESG classifications. By giving these capabilities to the domain experts, it allows for:
- Greatly accelerated time-to-market due to no IT resource dependencies, as well as no “lost in translation” issues when converting business requirements to technical designs
- Higher overall automation level since integrations that otherwise wouldn’t be feasible due to the IT cost now can be set up with a few clicks of a button
- Remove dependency on the vendor to maintain and/or change integrations
In addition, Limina IMS’s API-first design has full API coverage, allowing any bespoke integrations to be built on top of the platform.
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.
