A recent series of webinars hosted by Fencore across EMEA and APAC brought together senior operations and data leaders from asset managers, pension funds and consultancies to tackle a question that continues to challenge the industry: when should you build, buy or outsource components of your investment operations technology stack?
The insights that emerged reveal why so many firms end up stuck with fragmented, high-maintenance systems that don’t scale, and what successful modernization actually requires. Through the lens of investment accounting, here’s our take on how these lessons directly challenge conventional thinking about platform selection and implementation.
One of the webinar’s clearest themes: even historically sophisticated firms that built proprietary platforms years ago are reconsidering those decisions. As the engineers who created these systems retire and true total cost of ownership becomes impossible to ignore, firms are increasingly willing to buy capabilities they once considered untouchable.
The strategic insight is fundamental. Successful firms reserve “build” for capabilities that genuinely differentiate them in the market. And investment accounting isn’t a competitive edge.
Your alpha comes from investment strategy, client relationships, and operational efficiency – not from maintaining a bespoke accounting engine. Yet many firms continue treating investment accounting infrastructure as strategic IP, pouring resources into systems that deliver no competitive advantage while creating mounting technical debt.
The accounting calculations, reconciliation logic and NAV processes you need are fundamentally the same as every other firm in your market. The question becomes: do you want your engineering talent focused on rebuilding these commoditized capabilities, or on initiatives that actually distinguish you from competitors?
The webinar surfaced a sobering reality: building a data platform typically requires substantial multi-year commitments and dedicated engineering teams. That’s the initial build. Ongoing support, change management and integration work often exceeds the original implementation cost.
For investment accounting specifically, this translates to:
Webinar participants emphasized the partnership dimension as well. Selecting a platform provider should be about focusing your team’s energy on what drives business value while partnering with technology built specifically for investment accounting’s complexity.
A recurring theme from the webinar: most implementation failures stem from data challenges, not technology limitations.
Firms struggle because they don’t have clear visibility into what data they currently maintain, what’s flowing in from external sources, what they’re delivering to downstream consumers and the transformations happening between each step.
Legacy investment accounting platforms compound this problem. When you run on batch processes with manual reconciliation between books, you lose visibility into data lineage. You can’t see what’s transforming where, making any modernization effort exponentially harder.
Real-time, bitemporal accounting architectures fundamentally change this. When every event processes immediately with complete audit trails and versioning, you have transparent data lineage by design. You know exactly what changed, when it changed and what downstream impacts occurred.
FundGuard’s architecture addresses this directly: a single accounting engine powers all books of record from one dataset. No reconciliation between systems. No data duplication. No mystery transformations. This transparency makes integration and legacy retirement dramatically simpler because you can trace every data element through the system.
Webinar participants identified hybrid operating models as increasingly common: firms mixing build, buy and outsource across different domains.
This approach makes sense when applied strategically: build where you truly differentiate, buy commoditized capabilities, outsource non-core operations.
But many firms create problematic hybrids within their investment accounting stack itself: Separate systems for IBOR and ABOR, different platforms for liquid and illiquid assets, shadow systems for contingent NAV and manual processes to reconcile everything.
This isn’t strategic hybridization. It’s fragmentation driven by legacy constraints, not business logic.
For investment accounting, speed to value comes from platforms architected from inception to handle modern portfolio complexity:
The “buy” advantage only materializes when the platform was purpose-built for your domain. General-purpose data platforms or ERP systems adapted for investment accounting require extensive customization that erodes any speed benefit.
One of the webinar’s most valuable warnings: integration, change management, and governance responsibilities don’t disappear when you buy or outsource. They shift.
Even with a cloud-native investment accounting platform, you still own:
Firms that treat platform selection as purely a technology decision inevitably underestimate these costs. Firms that approach it as an operating model transformation—with executive sponsorship, cross-functional teams and dedicated change management—see faster time to value and lower total cost of ownership.
This is why FundGuard’s implementation methodology focuses on organizational dimensions alongside technical configuration. The platform’s full API architecture, pre-built integrations with industry systems and comprehensive workflow engine reduce integration complexity—but successful implementations still require clear ownership of business process change.
The webinar’s insights point to specific actions for firms evaluating their investment accounting infrastructure:
The Fencore webinar’s most valuable contribution was strategic clarity about differentiation.
Winning firms are crystal clear about where they differentiate and where they leverage best-in-class infrastructure. They’re not building bespoke accounting engines to support the same IBOR, ABOR, and NAV calculations every other firm needs. They’re partnering with platforms that handle those requirements at scale, with continuous innovation, so they can focus on what actually distinguishes them in the market.
For asset managers, that might be proprietary investment strategies or client experience. For fund administrators, it’s service quality and operational efficiency. For asset owners, it’s governance and risk oversight.
None of those differentiators require custom-built investment accounting platforms. They all benefit from modern, cloud-native systems of record that deliver real-time visibility, automated controls and the flexibility to support new asset classes without re-platforming.
As webinar participants observed, even the most technically sophisticated firms are revisiting decade-old decisions to build platforms that no longer make strategic sense. The question isn’t whether to modernize your investment accounting infrastructure, but rather Will you do it strategically or continue pouring resources into systems that don’t differentiate your firm?
Ready to explore what a modern investment accounting platform could mean for your operating model?
FundGuard’s cloud-native, AI-enabled architecture was built from inception to unify IBOR, ABOR, and NAV across public and private assets on a single real-time engine. Contact us to discuss how we help asset managers, fund administrators and asset owners reduce complexity, accelerate time to value and focus on what actually differentiates them in the market.
This article references insights from Fencore’s “Build vs Buy vs Outsource: Making the Right Call for Your Target Operating Model” webinar series. Learn more.
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