Impax Asset Management, an investment house that specialises in environmental projects, has selected three products from trading technology firm Linedata Services to help manage its growth. Impax’s assets under management (AUM) have grown by nearly 28% to £1.26 billion in the six months to May this year.
Impax has chosen Linedata’s LongView Trading order management system (OMS), its LyNX managed electronic trading service and its compliance management software – Linedata Compliance. All solutions are accessed on an application service provider (ASP) to minimise installation and maintenance costs.
“For the last three years, year-on-year, Impax has doubled its AUM. With more growth comes increased operational risk,” Darren Johnson, Impax’s head of operations, told theTRADEnews.com. “We wanted to invest in our systems and processes to ensure, from an operational risk and a business perspective, that we were ready for the next stage in our rapid growth.”
Previously, Impax was doing a lot of its front- and middle-office work manually. “Before using Linedata LongView Trading, we were using dealing sheets and written trade blotters, so we decided to increase levels of automation and to incorporate compliance procedures,” said Johnson. “At the time, we were using a spreadsheet to help us with our pre-trade and post- trade compliance, with built in checks to ensure that we did not break any mandated or compliance rules. That was inefficient for us, so we decided to purchase something that could incorporate all of this.”
A big attraction of the Linedata suite for Impax is that it is offered on an ASP basis, meaning that the company does not have to manage the hardware or support itself. “IT is not our area of expertise, so this ASP solution was excellent for us because it meant that we would not have to think about implications to our internal disaster recovery setup or additional IT overheads including hardware and internal support,” said Johnson.
According to Linedata sales executive Alex Iwinski, there is increasing demand for ASP services among trading houses with a smaller staff. “Traditionally, our client base would be using in-house deployed systems. We are now seeing an increase in managers with growing AUM, who choose to keep their business streamlined through outsourcing and the use of ASP technology,” he said. “This has already been recognised in the back-office, but it is a growing trend in the front-office as well.”