Investment Accounting-as-a-Service

What is Investment Accounting-as-a-Service?

Investment Accounting-as-a-Service (IaaS) is cloud based software for businesses looking to simplify their investment accounting, compliance, and risk reporting while significantly reducing the work required to process month-end, quarter-end and year-end close. Using this technology, businesses reduce capital expenses and free up resources to focus on more valuable tasks. Using this cloud-based solution has key advantages such as reducing IT operating costs, improving data quality and accuracy, speeding up reconciliation time, and significantly reducing month- and quarter-end closing times.

A recent trend for the insurance and investment management industry has seen existing legacy software vendors attempt to rebrand themselves in the market by simply re-badging themselves as a SaaS solution. They stand up a cloud-based instance of their single tenant software and call it a day. This is not Investment Accounting-as-a-Service.

For an IaaS solution to be truly cloud-native, it must operate within a single instance environment. The preferred design for SaaS is via a multi-tenant architecture, where data is separate and secure but backed by a single security master used by all clients. IaaS delivers market standardization, the ability to adapt to new data types, access to additional asset classes, real-time regulation updates, and overall scalability that cannot be achieved through on-premise or single-tenant solutions.

Why is Investment Accounting-as-a-Service important?

Many organizations are faced with needing armies of people and increasing infrastructure costs when it comes to managing their accounting needs. They find the data provided by their trading systems, custodians, and clearing centers is inconsistent and hard to reconcile. This challenge is only getting worse as companies expand globally and into increasing complex assets in search of higher yield. Also, given the ever-changing financial landscape in the last several years, there are rapidly expanding risk and compliance reporting requirements. As a result, many companies are rapidly adopting Investment Accounting-as-a-Service solutions to automate the daunting and time-consuming efforts of data aggregation, reconciliation, and reporting for their investment portfolios.

Insurance companies use IaaS to improve their visibility, speed month-end, quarter-end and year-end close, and produce the plethora of reports required for ongoing compliance & risk monitoring.

Asset managers use IaaS to drive timely and accurate client reporting.

Corporations use IaaS to understand risk profiles in their investment strategies and to complete the variety of accounting activities required for closing the books.

Employing automation alleviates these operational burdens and frees up time so employees can focus on analyzing investment data and opportunities to maximize their portfolio’s potential. Moreover, using IaaS empowers employees to react quickly to changing market conditions while staying in line with portfolio goals.

How does Clearwater Analytics help?

Clearwater’s solution enables you to make confident decisions when it comes to your investments. We provide the most accurate and up-to-date data because our system automatically gathers, cleans, and reconciles your investment data daily and what cannot be done with automation is reviewed and managed by a highly skilled team. This enables always-on reporting and analytics. Couple this with the fact that your data is updated every day and made available to you on our web-based platform yields true Investment Accounting-as-a-Service.

A clear differentiator with Clearwater is that we are the only solution offering a single instance, multi-tenant platform where a single version of the software is used by all clients. This allows us to maintain one universal and shared security master file. Since 91% of our data is auto reconciled using AI and machine learning discrepancies are quickly identified and corrected. If we find and correct an error for one client, that error is fixed for every client holding that same security automatically. We call this the “network effect.”

The network effect ensures that no matter the complexity of your investments – they may span many accounting regimes, hundreds of asset types, several accounting basis – your data and your investments are of the highest accuracy possible.

The collective benefits of Clearwater’s true Investment Accounting-as-a-Service:

• Provides a single go-to source for data and context
• Collects, organizes, and analyses data across multiple asset classes to generate a single view of the data
• Simplifies financial statement audit, regulatory compliance, and risk management efforts
• Helps to reduce costs, mitigate risk, increase compliance, and improve performance
• Becomes a growth enabler, allowing you to rapidly incorporate new assets and new businesses

The Clearwater solution provides you with the most advanced, cost-effective, and secure offering to support confident, real-time decision-making that can help your organization increase yield on investments. Learn more about IaaS and speak to an expert today.