The Model Buy Side award recognizes best practices of technology usage in the portfolio management and trade execution life cycle within the management of institutionally held assets.

Celent’s Model Buy Side seeks out exceptional examples of the use of technology across a wide variety of areas critical to success in the buy side. We support initiatives across all areas within institutional asset management supporting the portfolio management, trade execution and asset administration functions.

We plan to recognize one initiative as the overall Model Buy Side of the Year, the top honor. It is not a specific category and institutions do not nominate themselves for this award. Celent judges select one initiative from those already submitted.

There are no specific criteria for Model Buy Side of the Year. However, the winning initiatives typically deliver distinctively impressive business benefits to the financial institution.

A Model Buy Side award presents a number of PR opportunities for the winning firm. Celent analysts will write detailed case studies of each winning initiative. These case studies will be included in Celent’s Model Buy Side reports, thereby generating further exposure for the winning firms and their initiatives.

Celent also celebrates the winners with dedicated social posts highlighting the winner and initiative. Winners can issue their own press release announcing their award and why they were recognized as a Model Buy Side winner.

The nomination must be submitted by a Financial Institution on the “Buy Side” (e.g. institutional asset manager, fund manager, hedge fund, etc.). We welcome technology vendors to encourage their Buy Side clients to participate, but vendors themselves are not eligible for an award.

Any firm can apply, irrespective of whether it has any prior relationship with Celent. Celent does not charge any fees to participate in the Model Buy Side process.

Any IT related initiative, regardless of the date when it was executed, is eligible for the Model Buy awards. The initiative must be in production at the Financial Institution.

We seek initiatives that demonstrate how the use of technology has directly impacted business model / workflow, created a quantifiable improvement to customer experience, or deployed emerging technology bringing tangible results to the business.

For initiatives that rely on technology vendor solutions and expertise, the award often leads to an even stronger relationship between the winning firm and its vendor(s). While not explicitly awarding vendors, Celent recognizes their contribution to the initiative. In response, vendors often issue their own PR statements celebrating the achievements of their clients.

In that context, vendors may help firms to submit the nomination form, but the entire process belongs to the firm.

All nominations must be submitted online via the Celent website. Please look for the 'Submit Nomination’ button on this page.

Submissions for our 2025 program are now closed.

The financial institutions are welcome to submit multiple nominations, but they must be substantively different. Do not submit the same initiative more than once.

If the improvements relate to the same solution (e.g. different functionalities to your digital platform), we would recommend submitting a single application and highlighting the various functionalities as key features for why you believe your platform merits an award. We expect competition to be fierce, and by fragmenting your platform functionality into discrete components, you run the risk that none of them individually will be strong enough to win. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity.

Yes, please upload the material to the Additional Material section of the nomination form.

We will send an email confirmation to the contact indicated in the submission and, if applicable, vendor contacts also listed there. If you haven’t heard from us within a few days of your submission, please contact us at modelbuyside@celent.com.

Protecting the confidentiality of the firms with whom we have a relationship is an obligation we take extremely seriously.

We may use anonymized data from any submission for research purposes. We will not, however, publish or disclose any information about the nomination that could be directly attributed to you. We will ask your permission before mentioning your company by name in the context of your Model Buy Side submission.

If your nomination wins an award, we will work with you to publish a case study of your initiative. Your firm will be mentioned by name, and we will publish the case study only after you have reviewed it in a timely fashion and given your approval. Once published, we may refer to the case study again in other publications as an example of good practice. Please refer to the section “WHAT HAPPENS IF WE WIN A MODEL BUY SIDE AWARD?” for more details on this.

No, we will never disclose the fact that you submitted a Model Buy Side nomination, unless we recognize you as a Model Buy Side award winner. In the event that we wish to refer to your nomination in another context, we will contact you to obtain permission before doing so.

We will judge the initiatives on three criteria:

Business Benefits

The most important of the three evaluation criteria. We are looking for initiatives with a clear and sustainable impact on the financial institution’s business, so make sure to include quantifiable business benefits. We appreciate that some benefits are hard to quantify, but vague statements about expected benefits from the business case will not be sufficient. We also appreciate that you don’t want to divulge potentially competitively sensitive information. If you are not comfortable sharing absolute figures with us, feel free to talk about relative performance (for example, percentage revenue increase or cost-saving).

Degree of Innovation

This measure looks at how innovative the initiative is in using technology to improve sales or service results, reduce risks or costs, or improve business processes. The initiative doesn’t have to be the “world’s first,” although that obviously helps. We are interested in how you experiment with emerging technologies to drive your business. However, innovation doesn’t only mean “bleeding edge” technology; often it is about how you apply technology to enhance your customer experience or to transform the ways of working.

Technology or Implementation Excellence

Some initiatives are noteworthy for their extreme difficulty, complexity of technology, or implementation excellence. Did you find a really interesting way to collaborate with a third party? Have you woven a complex ecosystem to deliver the solution? If so, we want to hear about it, and such an initiative will score highly on this dimension.

All Celent Capital Markets analysts are involved in the judging process, although the exact approach should perhaps remain “a secret sauce.”

No. We will not give preference to clients in the selection process and will ensure that we were not directly involved in the creation or deployment of any of the initiatives that will be recognized. To do otherwise would mean compromising Celent’s values and risking our reputation we have taken such great care to build.

Naturally, the main factor determining a nomination’s success is the strength of your own initiative. Remember, we will only award “live” initiatives which are already delivering business benefits, although we will also accept advanced stage pilots, as long as they have measurable results.

• Focus on essential points, but don’t skimp on detail. It is surprising how many entries suffer from lack of clarity. Please do not expect us to understand internal acronyms or team names. Your initiative might be brilliant, but if we can’t understand it, you won’t win. Clarity of your submission is crucial!
• If applicable, don’t hesitate to involve the vendor when submitting your nomination form; however, make sure that you (the financial institution) are actively engaged in and own the Model Buy Side process.
• The final success factor is the strength of competition. As with all the awards, it’s all relative, and Celent appreciates that it’s not something you can do much about. It can be the case that we have many entries in one theme category and yet be starved of quality entries in others.

Submissions for our 2025 program are now closed.

We expect to notify the award winners in February 2025. We will send an email to the individuals with contact details on the submission form. If there is a vendor involved and contact details are available, we will copy the vendor as well.

We will also email all nominees who did not win the award, typically a couple of days after we communicate results to the winners.