Perfect portfolio management

Hazem Elmalla of Advent Software outlines why Middle East companies now need to deploy portfolio management software more than ever before.

In a previous issue of BM you said that financial houses in the Middle East rely too much on legacy systems, often based Excel spreadsheets. Do you still feel this to be the case?
Hazem Elmalla. We still feel that there are many major financial houses that rely on legacy systems and Excel for book keeping of their investments and some basic financial reporting. These organisations need to start by analysing their internal operations and identifying the key risk that threatens their business due to lack of proper systems and enterprise strength infrastructure. These risks can vary from lost data, erroneous data entry, inaccurate reporting calculations to the damaging compliance and regulation violations. Then they will need to look at their internal workflow between departments and work on introducing the proper systems to help with increasing efficiency and scalability to their operations.

What key trends are you witnessing in the Gulf, as well as the common mistakes being made by investment management organisations?
HE. We noticed that there are more and more investment management firms who are looking to diversify their portfolios by introducing hedging strategies and unconventional investment vehicles such as Derivatives and Swaps, as they realise that relying only on the conventional Equity and Fixed Income investments can expose them to major market risks and limits their ability to protect their clients and investors from such events as the current market downturn. The need for electronic trading capabilities is increasing. Exchanges in all countries are looking into offering these capabilities, if they don’t already. Firms need to have a relevant front office system in place in order to take advantage of this opportunity. This allows them to reduce manual work, cut down on errors i.e. reduce cost and operational risk.

How are your products and services benefiting your clients in the region? Do you have specific examples?
HE. Advent offers the most tightly integrated single vendor solutions available. These have been developed and delivered by professional experts with a broad and deep market understanding of the business requirements in the region. A solution like Advent Portfolio Exchange has enabled many of our regional clients to leverage the integrated client relationship management component to provide highly personalised client service that helped them distinguish themselves from competition and attract new business. Moxy which is the industry leading order management system and part of Advent’s offerings to the investment management community has helped many of our clients achieve true straight through processing by automating key functionalities like portfolio modeling, rebalancing and trade order management processes. Also Moxy has the ability to route orders electronically utilising the industry standard protocol FIX which reduces manual duplications and errors by minimising manual intervention in the trading process. 

What’s your vision for the market in the near future and how will Advent Software play its part in the Middle East?
HE. We see a challenging period ahead for our clients as the uncertainty in the markets continues, and they are being extra cautious with their budgets and watching their costs very carefully. At the same time these companies understand the importance of enhancing their capabilities to manage their investment operation efficiently and provide superior services to their clients while acquiring new businesses. Advent, as a technology partner, will make sure that we help our clients and prospects manage through this cycle to achieve their goals of controlling costs and at the same time growing their business. Our vision is that we continually demonstrate our commitment to the region with an expansion of our team in the Dubai office which is now almost five years old and also the opening of an office in Riyadh later this year.

Hazem Elmalla joined Advent Software in 2000 as an application developer and systems integration specialist. He now works as a senior implementation and business consultant. He was involved in the implementation, support and solution delivery for some of the largest firms in the asset management industry and graduated from City University of New York with a Bachelor degree in Computer Science.