If you’ve already decided that managing your firm’s portfolios and accounting for your organization’s investments are best done with a comprehensive, specialized software package, why not use a comprehensive, specialized source for obtaining all of your organization’s referential data? In many cases, financial organizations need to look no further than to their portfolio management and investment accounting software providers for their referential data. Offering value-added services, many of these software providers also offer complete spectrums of referential data, including market prices, benchmark data, corporate actions, security master file information, and other types of high-demand data that are needed for effective management of investments.

Public treasuries, investment managers, pension funds, family offices, and most other financial organizations typically need referential data that is served by disparate data providers. Often, a single vendor cannot provide all of the data an organization needs to maintain its portfolios, and consequently an organization’s staff members must spend countless hours researching data providers, possibly writing RFPs to find the best vendors, choosing and negotiating contracts with multiple vendors, and finally translating the referential data into useful formats that can be loaded into the resident portfolio management and accounting system (or systems, in some cases). Furthermore, after the initial data contracts and feeds are established, additional time may need to be allocated for periodic contract review, maintenance of system interfaces, and validation of data.

Rather than wasting needed resources on the logistical tasks surrounding procurement of market data, allow your employees to focus on tasks that can directly affect your bottom line. Entrust your portfolio management software provider with finding and supplying your organization with the right market data that fits your business needs and meets your budget. In most cases, your software provider will have extensive experience in working with data vendors and translating multiple data formats into usable feeds. After all, your software provider is already familiar with the types of data your organization needs, and they are intimately familiar with the interfaces and corresponding data formats that are needed to directly import data into their systems. What’s more, the software provider usually has the leverage to negotiate more competitive contracts because of the overall volume of data they purchase. Your organization will ultimately benefit and save money by allowing a single point of contact (who you already trust and have a contract with) to negotiate with multiple vendors at once so that it can act as a large-scale reseller of referential data to your organization.

With the industry’s movement toward consolidation and streamlining of business operations, it only makes sense to first consider businesses with whom your organization has existing relationships before entering into purchasing agreements for products and services related to portfolio management and investment accounting. As software vendors continue to move away from traditional, product-focused environments and toward solution-driven environments, they will look to add more services that are attractive to their clients. Market data feeds, as well as outsourced financial reporting, accounting, reconciliation, and performance measurement, are all services that many software companies now provide.

About QED Financial Systems

Based in Marlton New Jersey, QED Financial Systems is a unique provider of a totally integrated portfolio accounting system solution to the public and private sectors. A small, privately owned company, QED carefully selects the relationships they choose to partner with and then provides an extraordinary degree of initial and ongoing service. As a result of this, QED has a 100% referenceable client base that is the envy of its industry. QED's clients account for approximately $1 Trillion in assets managed with its largest single client managing approximately $180 Billion.

About the Authors

Laura Castle is a technical documentation specialist with QED Financial Systems. Working previously with Prudential Financial, Ms. Castle is experienced with creating sophisticated financial documentation, including online help systems, technical manuals, marketing pieces,training guides, and web sites.

Steven M. Kendus, Vice President of Marketing with QED, is a corporate communications expert with more than 15 years of technical and marketing writing experience and more than seven years of executive management experience in software- and Web-oriented environments. Mr. Kendus has assisted financial organizations, including The Bank of New York and Integrated Software Solutions, in enhancing their productivity and identity through training, documentation, marketing, and business process optimization.