Investment Book of Record

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 3^rd 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.