Competitive forces and increasingly stringent regulations require that asset management firms analyze their processes and procedures to streamline operations. They need to reduce costs while simultaneously strengthening compliance.

Therefore, intelligent asset management companies – private equity firms, hedge funds, family offices, wealth managers – are increasingly implementing automation strategies. Their goals are to optimize operations, strengthen customer relationships, and keep the regulators happy.

As part of this process, they’re examining everything – the way they access and use data; customer interaction procedures; and governance, risk, and compliance management — to see where automation will serve them best.

Overcome these Challenges with a Business Rules-based System

Asset management firms already have multiple technologies on which they have depended for many years, but generally don’t meet all their requirements.

Walk into any firm, and you’ll find a range of systems and approaches. On the applications side, you’ll find legacy mainframes, client server-based systems, and SaaS technologies. Data may be stored in the mainframes, on the cloud, within third-party systems, buried in spreadsheets, or even buried away in file rooms filled with paper.

To get out of the “seek and ye may or may not find” mess and embrace automation, they need to consider whether to take a “build, buy, or both” approach.

In an ideal world, every intelligent asset management organization would go with a homegrown solution, which ensures that everything is completely customized for the ways they do business. In that ideal world, custom software development would be quick, efficient, secure, low-cost, and exceptionally high quality.

“Bought” solutions are great – for about 80 percent of the general operations that every single asset management organization performs. One issue is the 20 percent that makes a single asset management company unique. The second is that regulatory requirements often change more quickly than lines of code, and the “bought” solution’s own development team may not be able to keep up quickly enough.

Going “Both” with Business Process Automation with Custom Business Rules

A no-code business process automation (BPA) platform based on clearly defined business rules delivers the best of both worlds. It leverages all the benefits of the custom development without the drawbacks while it can easily be integrated into existing systems.

A BPA platform allows for design of intelligent asset management automations and workflows to streamline and improve competitive business processes, implementation of flexible business rules that can change on the fly, and easy integration of existing systems to create a single place to access critical data. Even better – a BPA allows everything to be in a single place.

The magic in a BPA platform is in the business rules. Business rules and workflows allow for not only complete and intelligent asset management automation, but also streamline the existing processes that require individual oversight. Many value-added activities can be semi automated, where the business rules direct what information should be gathered, how it should be presented, and to whom it should be routed for review and approvals.

That information is delivered via the same engine, which serves as an integration and orchestration solution, gathering all the data into one system to create a single source of truth. Simultaneously, they can orchestrate third-party services.

The People to Make it Happen

The reason you are working to automate or semi-automate your business processes using business rules is so your employees can do what you actually hired them for, the thing they do best – their jobs. That’s why insights from the business process owners are critical to the integration of a BPA solution into existing systems to create an intelligent asset management platform.

The ideal team to implement a BPA platform consists of members of IT and the business process departments. By working together, they can leverage the expertise from each to build the system not only the way they want, but so it actually works as intended.

For more information about implementing a Business Process Automation platform within your Asset Management organization, please download our whitepaper: Business Rules & Intelligent Automation in Asset Management.