Designed for integration

Investortools’ individual products can be integrated into a single application, providing customers with the benefit of one system potentially spanning portfolio management, credit analysis, compliance (including 2a-7 money fund and private account compliance), and risk attribution.

Technology products must co-exist with existing in-house software and systems. To that end we work with an expanding set of data partners.  In the Investortools software architecture, there is virtually no limit to the number of data imports and exports that can be created.

DESIGNED FOR SECURITY

Our software is designed to be installed on our clients’ internal networks, securing customer data behind your firm’s firewall. The software is accessed from a common folder, is not technologically intrusive with existing network processes, and is designed to be scaled to multiple locations using Terminal Services, Citrix, or the browser interface.

Designed for customization

Investortools systems are often integrated into a client’s existing processes and workflow, using software components customized by Investortools.  (See Customization.)

CONFIGURABILITY

Our products are built using highly configurable components. That means that an experienced user can take a stock report, modify it and answer his own specific questions. But it also means that our customization group can model one of our client’s whole workflow process using components designed just for them. None the less, we still deliver these components on a common base of maintained code shared by all of our clients.

DATABASE

Fixed income analytics is based on cash flow analysis. This is not just mathematical modeling, but it’s also a matter of modeling the various security types accurately. In the end, this creates a database problem. Commercial database architectures are not designed for the speed that we need, and the tuning that would be required would result in essentially an unrecognizable commercial database. We have developed an in-house, proprietary database structure, with a small footprint that gives our users the speed that they expect.

INTEGRATION

Investortools products are not deployed into a vacuum. They need to coexist with a large number of our clients' in-house systems, and with other institutions’ systems. We’ve built into Perform and other key products a large number of exports and imports; we can for example bring in tickets if ticketing is done in another platform. We can create tickets to be distributed to other platforms. We bring in benchmark indicatives so that the descriptions on the securities will be accurate, from various institutional indicative providers. We bring in pricing and we have bi-directional feeds for all sorts of back office and in-house systems.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

We’re enthusiastic about the opportunities provided by our new web services capability. This opens up the door to a new class of user who may not have the time to master all of the intricacies of our main products, but to whom we can still deliver analytics as part of their corporate intranet. The corporate site can query our products in real time and get back pdf reports, client packages to be given out, or even just raw data that can then be further leveraged. We’re also very excited about redeveloping our entire user interface as we head to a native browser-based delivery platform. This new browser interface is feature-complete and available today for CreditScope clients and is available in a beta version for Perform clients.  We can't wait for you to see what we've been working on.