In Part II of our “AI Insights” series, Peter Muldoon, Product Strategy Director at FundGuard, discusses how AI could transform investment accounting and how it intersects with the broader shifts happening across operations, technology, and risk management.
AI has quickly become part of the investment accounting conversation, but much of the discussion is still heavy on labels and light on substance. At FundGuard, we treat AI as a practical layer of intelligence that strengthens controls, enhances data quality and supports more resilient, multi-asset class operating models across ABOR, IBOR, and NAV oversight. The goal has been not to reposition accounting around AI, but to embed AI into the places where it improves accuracy, security, and scalability.
Authentication is no longer a single moment in time. With credential theft and impersonation attempts increasing across financial services, AI-based behavioral authentication has become an essential safeguard.
AI can evaluate navigation patterns, timing, device use, and typical workflows to confirm that a logged-in user is truly the right user. When behavior deviates from established patterns, the system can flag it in real time—strengthening identity validation beyond passwords or MFA alone.
For cloud-native platforms like FundGuard, continuous and context-aware security represents a natural progression aligned with regulator and auditor expectations.
Traditional data controls—price tolerance checks, variance reviews, corporate action validations—remain valuable but narrow. They focus on isolated data points and often depend on manual investigation.
AI enables broader, cross-dataset reasoning.
Instead of checking only whether a price or distribution amount looks reasonable, AI can compare data across peer funds/securities, historical patterns, market trends, and related attributes. This expanded analysis can detect inconsistencies that rule-based checks often miss.
The result is stronger analytical assurance: AI doesn’t replace accountants. It gives them a more complete, data-driven picture of potential risk.
AI’s impact on accounting is limited by the technology beneath it. Legacy systems are often constrained by asset-type silos and batch-driven processing, generating point-in-time balances that are quickly overwritten and pushed to downstream warehouses just to be preserved. Corrections, cancels, and restatements further fragment the picture. In these environments, AI can only evaluate outcomes after processes finish—never while the accounting is actually happening.
Cloud-native platforms can operate differently.
Cloud-native platforms operate fundamentally differently. Modern systems like FundGuard unify all asset types within a single portfolio model and assume real-time data movement. Workflows and exceptions are event-driven, and results are versioned rather than overwritten—so every change remains visible and traceable. In this environment, AI can participate directly in the operating flow, reinforcing controls, validating data, and escalating exceptions as the accounting is happening, not after the fact.
Several forces are accelerating AI adoption in accounting:
At the same time, accounting teams are becoming more comfortable with AI as a supportive tool to reduce noise, improve consistency and focus human attention where judgment is needed.
FundGuard is actively exploring these practical applications: AI for pattern detection, data validation, control reinforcement, and continuous security. The objective is not to make AI the centerpiece, but to ensure every accounting output is more accurate, timely, and dependable.
AI will reshape investment accounting through accumulated, incremental improvements, not through a single disruptive event. Stronger authentication, smarter controls, richer validations and architectures built for continuous analysis will combine to create safer and more resilient operating models.
FundGuard’s approach is to harness AI where it adds tangible value and strengthens the core of accounting through a series of meaningful improvements: smarter controls, richer validations, enhanced security and operating models designed for continuous insight.
Discover the possibilities. Request a demo today.
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