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Dr. Lance Smith, CEO The capital markets industry is perpetually going through metamorphosis on account of changing regulations and economic evolution. To keep up with the speed of change, banks, broker-dealers, and asset managers must stay ahead of technology innovations in order to deliver optimal portfolio management services and meaningful risk analysis to their clients.At the forefront, helping financial firms successfully navigate the choppy waters of market risk, portfolio performance, and trading is Imagine Software. Having catered to the needs of the global financial service industry for close to three decades, today Imagine Software is renowned for their institutional-grade portfolio and risk management software the Imagine Financial Platform (IFP). The solution provides clients with full-service, on-line accessibility to real-time pricing and market data. Whether the need of the hour is to monitor and report global limits, perform stress tests, aggregate firm-wide risk, or deliver enhanced transparency, Imagine creates the integrated solutions that fit a firm. With Imagine Software’s comprehensive technology and data management strategies, buy-side managers can now focus on increasing returns and attracting more investors.
Behind Imagine’s cutting-edge investment management solutions is Dr. Lance Smith the CEO of the company who brings a unique combination of business and academic experience to his role at Imagine Software. A former math professor at the Columbia University with 25 years of direct involvement in trading and risk management practices, Dr. Smith is well-versed with the nuances in the financial market and the challenges faced by buy-side professionals. Under Dr. Smith's leadership and expertise, the company has spread its footprint across Asia, Australia, and the US and is trusted by thousands of users at the world's largest hedge funds, funds of funds, brokerage firms, and investment banks.
Win Investor Confidence
A major reason behind this traction is the IFP, which provides clients access to an ever-expanding range of applications that are scalable according to changing market conditions. Based on a multi-tiered extensible architecture, currently the platform comprises over 40 off-the-shelf apps that allow users to build their own models. Along those lines, clients have leveraged IFP to create over 500 unique apps for risk and compliance reporting, margin replication and calculation, excel automation, multivariate beta analytics, portfolio rebalancing, upcoming and past corporate actions reporting, calculators and more.
Imagine Software is trusted by thousands of users at the world's largest hedge funds, funds of funds, brokerage firms, and investment banks
The company simultaneously tracks regulatory limits and investment risk, identifies potential intra-day breaches of capital utilization limits, and performs institutional-grade due diligence across asset classes and across the firm. Imagine sources the underlying funds’ position-level data and pricing directly from administrators, prime brokers, and internal systems. In fact prices are archived daily on more than 90,000 exchange-traded instruments along with foreign exchange, spot, yield curves, roll curves, credit curves, and volatility surfaces.
With the right information and the ability to perform real-time calculations on thousands of trades per second, across millions of positions, managers in high-volume environments are empowered with the critical ability to meet compressed reporting timeframes. An all-in-one-solution in the truest sense, clients also use Imagine to manage evolving reporting and regulatory challenges as well whether for Open Protocol, Form PF, 40 Act, UCITS or other frameworks. This enables clients to achieve strategic growth targets while managing evolving regulatory demands. In addition, Imagine also provides a host of value-added processing services that remove the challenges around calculating and archiving P&L, posting coupons, as well as resetting and calculating accruals and payments to prepare portfolios for the next trading day.
Never losing sight of innovation, the company recently launched a flexibly-designed margin solution that allows clients to calculate the margin requirement on a portfolio utilizing various exchange rules, Reg T. or even “house rules” that a prime broker would use. The margin requirement calculations can be invoked programmatically, and clients can anticipate and avoid margin calls, especially in turbulent markets.
End-to-end Holistic Solution
It’s not just their strong solutions suite but also Imagine’s easy on boarding journey and customer centric nature that makes them stand out in the industry.
In another case in point a global trading firm needed to rapidly increase operational efficiencies and expand its risk management analytics to support its growing trading operations. Prior to implementing Imagine's solutions, the client was using internally built systems that were falling behind in the advent of evolving security and trading demands. Since installing the Imagine system to manage trading risk, the client witnessed multiple benefits. Imagine took care of all the consolidated real time P&L and back office functions and also provided a complete global security master file for all exchange traded instruments. Overtime, the client was able to increase transactions processed 500 percent without major increases in staffing.
"Imagine’s superior technology and analytics help firms develop and execute optimal trading strategies across equities, fixed income, credit, foreign exchange, commodities, swaps, and exotic asset classes"
For the maximum benefit of clients the company also has a strong partnership network that comprises a community of industry experts and advisors. This includes leading names such as J.P.Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg and more. Imagine's competitive-edge is also heavily derived from their richly diverse and expert team that represents forty-plus nationalities and speaks thirty-plus languages. Most of the in-house personnel at Imagine are drawn from a variety of financial services and institutional banking backgrounds. Specifically, Imagine's in-house consulting team assists organizations in every step of the way to deliver best-practice recommendations, optimized workflow processes, and complete support.
Imagine’s industry leadership status reflects both its strong history of innovation and its commitment to creating the best-in-class risk solutions to meet diverse client and market needs. Clearly, with Imagine Software, financial firms are looking at the face of the future of investment management.
