Building a better asset and risk management platform with elastic Azure services

Elasticity means services can expand and contract on demand. This means Azure customers who are on a pay-as-you-go plan will reap the most benefit out of Azure services. Their service is always available, but the cost is kept to a minimum. This feature is so important, one Microsoft partner is using it as a point of differentiation.

Modular and elastic benefits

A key attribute of Azure is the interchangeable nature of services. Together with elasticity, Azure lets modern enterprises migrate and evolve more easily. For financial service providers, the modular approach lets customers benefit from best-of-breed analytics and in these areas:

• Risk and performance analytics: Azure Data Lake Storage, DataBricks, and Azure Stream Analytics are just a few of the options for calculating risk.
• Regulatory compliance automation (regtech): Automating compliance using Azure DevOps or using a service provider such as CloudNeeti simplifies an arduous task.
• Investment management technology: Azure Virtual Machines or Azure Functions are just two options for managing investment portfolios.

With these capabilities, asset managers can build superior products that generate higher returns for their clients.

Financial services is a tough market

Competition in the asset management industry has ramped for active vs. active, passive vs. active, and passive vs. passive, while margins are shrinking. At the same time, costly, outdated, and difficult-to-maintain legacy systems and technology are impacting both costs and operational efficiencies, putting a further drag on performance, while also making it difficult to scale. A new Microsoft partner, Axioma, is helping its clients in the financial services industry to regain and retain a competitive edge.

On-premises means rigid resources

Many investment firms have relied on physical datacenters as a means of maintaining control and security. But such properties and legacy systems are costly to maintain and difficult to scale. Given market volatility, fee compression, and an overall competitive investment landscape, fund managers are seeking flexible solutions to discover, create, and implement superior investment strategies and products. Specifically, the need is for enterprise-wide analytics, data, reporting, and data storage.

Cloud elasticity is a vital attribute

Axioma offers an open and flexible platform, where each building block is accessible via APIs. Their platform is a cloud-native architecture but modularity allows seamless integration points with other best-of-breed providers. For example, Axioma Risk is an enterprise-wide multi-asset class (MAC) risk-management platform. With the solution, asset managers can efficiently scale assets under management (AUM) to drive revenue growth and reduce the effects of margin compression.

Build a unified platform with Azure

When using Azure to build a platform, the users of the platform benefit from a common architecture. For example, Axioma helps to migrate solutions to their platform axiomaBlue. The clients then benefit from a common engine that calculates risk and performance analytics. Having one engine on the platform also means using the same underlying market and reference data. Clients, therefore, have a consistent view of risk and return across their enterprise and across front, middle, and back-office functions.

On a specialized platform, users can create flexible, modular, workflow solutions. For financial services, the platform approach means a highly specialized set of components, as shown in this graphic.

Azure services used

Axioma is a primary example of using the elastic and modular attributes of Azure to its fullest extent. They use these Azure services:

• Service Fabric 
• Virtual machines (Windows and Linux) 
• VM Scale Sets / Load Balancers
• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Data Lake
• Azure SQL Database
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Storage Accounts 
• Service Bus/Relays

Recommended next steps

Go to the Azure marketplace listing for AxiomaBlue and click Contact me.