Looking front to back and gazing ahead
On 27 Apr 2023, Deutsche Boerse announced a takeover of SimCorp to combine its existing data & analytics subsidiaries Qontigo and ISS under the umbrella of Investment Management Solutions unit under one leadership. Before diving into the finer details, I would like to state upfront that we view this move as significant, bold and aspirational but not unexpected. Let me explain why this maneuver is not unexpected.
In one of Celent's 2019 landmark study NextGen Invest and Risk Tech: Gazing Through A Crystal Ball Into 2030, we already anticipated secular themes playing out throughout the investment sector — around alpha generation, cost takeouts and the ongoing digitization of the investment value chain. Back then, we attempted to answer a number of hard-hitting questions around the appetite of asset managers, asset owners and solution providers pertaining to their technology and operations strategies, specifically:
- To what degree will convergence continue, and in what form?
- Will end-to-end solution paradigms win over 'best of breed' approaches?
- How, and where will digitization effects play out?
At that time, we presented five operational archetypes for investment management firms, encouraging both investment firms and vendors to rethink their technology deployments from an applications and data architecture standpoint — and to deliberate these strategic archetypes and requisite capability imperatives upfront, rather than merely as an afterthought. For each archetype, we also 'predicted' the adoption and IT investments associated with each approach to evolve significantly, compared to where firms stand at present. We adopted a 'crystal ball' approach to help investment firms anticipate the future - selected archetypes are shown below.
