Pictet Asset Management and Finsemble Win WatersTechnology's 2021 Best Buy-Side Implementation Award

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Nov. 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cosaic the workflow solution provider bringing smart desktop technology to the finance industry, has been awarded the 2021 WatersTechnology award for its implementation with Pictet Asset Management. The project brings Cosaic's Finsemble, the smart desktop platform, across Pictet's buy-side desks to increase efficiency and boost the performance of portfolio managers and traders.

Banks and buy-sides suffering from application overload use Finsemble to connect and sync their applications to create automated workflows, decreasing error rate and improving efficiency. In fact, interoperability has become increasingly imperative in the finance industry, backed by the FDC3 open standards for application communication (see Trader Desktop Interoperability Comes of Age from A-Team Insights). With its implementation, Pictet Asset Management has become a leader in buy-side interoperability.

"Pictet Asset Management is creating automated workflows never before seen at buy-side firms," says Cosaic CEO and co-founder Dan Schleifer. "Their innovation team has challenged the status quo and created use cases that are influencing other buy-sides implementing interoperability."

Pictet Asset Management is an independently owned asset management company with assets under management of over 200 billion, offering multiple strategies across equity, multi-asset, FX and fixed income. Like most firms, cross-application workflows created complexity and inefficiencies. Automating workflows across different types of applications—in-house, third-party, native etc.—was the challenge. A technology team led by Carl James, Global Head of Fixed Income, selected Finsemble as their interoperability solution.

"When it comes to solving for the complications of cross-application workflow, Finsemble was the only solution that provided the infrastructure and extensive support our technology team needed to build out the automation we imagined," says James. "The traders have been able to collapse workflows, and reduce the time to access liquidity, and hence capture increased alpha for our clients."

The results of automating these workflows are impressive. In one measurement, Pictet traders were able to save ten minutes a trade due to the automated workflows, such as:

Money Markets Workflow — A cumbersome, multi-step process has now been streamlined. Yield calculations are automated, including pricing future cash flows with currency exposure by automatically connecting to Bloomberg in order to price FX forwards.

FX Pricer Workflow — A backend FIX gateway with connectivity to a number of liquidity providers feeds a database of spot prices. Traders get a real-time view of the best FX prices required to hedge a particular bond order with a single click in Charles River (their OMS), and can spawn historical Bloomberg charts for additional context.

Credit and Axe Data Workflow — Axe data from specific counterparties and market aggregators is consolidated and made available from a single click inside Charles River, immediately showing the trader how liquid the issue is and what the current prices are. Traders can then collaborate with the fund manager to find alpha, by seeing the contents of existing portfolios, interested buyers, and being presented with similar bonds. Context is added using the Bloomberg API to calculate spreads, complemented by analytics shown using ChartIQ charts.

To see a recorded demonstration of these workflows, visit cosaic.io/pictet-interoperability-journey.

"Finsemble is different from other players in the market in that our product team provides support from POC to post-production," says Schleifer. "Our solutions engineers worked closely with Pictet Asset Management from the beginning of the ideation to the current project evolution. The Finsemble team and Pictet's technologists worked to answer the question: What can interoperability do for you?"

Along with its extensive production support, Finsemble also provides industry-leading native support. Because the majority of buy-sides depend on native and legacy applications, the ability to include .NET and Java applications in automated workflows is a necessity. Learn more about Finsemble native support at https://cosaic.io/finsemble/industry-leading-native-support/.

In addition to this implementation, Finsemble also won Waters' Technology's 2021 Best Sell-Side Implementation with Citi. As a measure of Pictet's innovation, they recently won Best Buy-Side Fixed Income Trading Desk at the European Markets Choice awards.

About Cosaic
Cosaic provides state-of-the art software for firms that want to promote ingenuity, evolve intelligently, and improve end-user efficiency. Products include ChartIQ, the world-renowned financial charting software, and Finsemble, the world's first no-code smart desktop platform. As a workflow solutions provider, Cosaic is revolutionizing the way people work with over 300 global customers around the world, including Yahoo  Finance, E*TRADE, Charles River, and Fidessa. Founded in 2012 as ChartIQ, Cosaic is a fast-growing firm based in Charlottesville, VA with offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit https://cosaic.io.

About Pictet Asset Management
Pictet Asset Management is an independently owned asset management company with assets under management of over 200 billion. Pictet Asset Management offers multiple strategies across equity, multi-asset, FX and fixed income, with eighteen offices globally and 900 employees—of which over 400 are investment professionals.

SOURCE Cosaic

Related Links

cosaic.io