Leading digital technology services consultancy Fimatix has announced the acquisition of Financial Services technology specialist Idea Group for an undisclosed sum, as part of its next stage of growth in the digital services marketplace.

The purchase enables Fimatix to expand its public sector and consulting arms by integrating and building out Idea Group’s existing technology solutions and services and marrying them with pre-existing internal expertise across a wide range of sectors. Idea Group has over twenty years’ experience servicing the financial services community, where it has earned a reputation for fostering innovation, particularly in the pensions sector.

Incorporating Idea Group’s Prodigy solution will place Fimatix at the cutting edge of regulatory governance and reporting – especially important with the growing emphasis on ESG – by allowing clients to collate data and apply process controls to get full governance insight through the entire lifecycle of financial services products and services.

The FCA's recently issued warning to fund managers about poor quality ESG fund applications can be seen as a bit of greenwashing wake-up call.

In a letter to chairs of authorised fund managers, Nick Miller, Head of Department of the FCA's Asset Management Supervision said:

"We are concerned by the number of poor-quality fund applications we have seen and the impact this may have on consumers. This must improve."

The FCA said 'a sizeable percentage' of the applications it receives have significant issues with ESG-related data metrics...

Social exclusion hurts, often bringing sad or angry thoughts which linger. A long week of endless zoom calls leaves me feeling excluded. It's no surprise that solitary confinement is a military punishment.

Strictly speaking the pandemic might not have been solitary confinement, but it did involve a significant lack of social inclusion. After extended periods of silence, most of us like nothing better than the sound of another human voice. The saying 'no man is an island' rings particularly true right now. Any prolonged amount of social exclusion can cause lowered cognitive functioning, as well as psychiatric disorders like depression and social anxiety...

A joint study by business systems house Idea Group and financial consultancy Devlin Mambo has shown data quality and availability to be the leading governance concern of participating asset management firms.

"We want people to feel they can really trust the industry - and to feel they can really connect with it. This means customers not just being told that something is ESG but actually being able to see that it is."

Jill Jackson, CEO, 'The Big Exchange' - Idea Group ESG Roundtable discussion, February 2021

In every facet of the asset management industry, there is (quite rightly) a renewed focus on improving data quality. This focus is reinforced by regulatory bodies, industry associations and most importantly, increased consumer demand for timely, accurate and consistent information...

Why should automation and reconciliations, in this day and age, still be on the agenda? While volumes have increased massively, legacy systems are struggling to keep up...

Having spent the largest part of the lockdown period on the Clyde coast, I felt it appropriate to start this article with a quote from the Bard of Ayrshire, Scotland’s favourite poet, Robert Burns. And this particular quote, albeit translated from the auld Scots, neatly describes the aim of some of the marketing work Idea Group has been doing of late...

One side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a relaxation of certain rules by financial regulatory authorities – the motivation being to remove or reduce barriers to the working of markets whilst offices are closed and remote working is the norm...

Working from home has taught us many things - and one of the big ones is just how important our ordinary human interactions have been in masking gaping holes in everyday work processes...

Here’s a bit of history for you. Way back in the ‘noughties’, a Parrott and a Bird – that’s me - set up Aviary, a pension accounting software business, which was initially focused on regulatory SORP reporting. But it didn’t take us long to realise that our raw data was coming from a wide range of 3rd party systems and consequently, automated reconciliation was the order of the day...

In more that 25 years working within the asset management industry creating and campaigning product, it would be true to say I have always aimed to build my success on processes which are tried and proven. And while some fund managers make effective use of robust and reliable processes to generate products and solutions, from original concepts through subsequent launch, the practice is by no means as rigorous as it could be...

Forty years ago, when I worked in telecommunications and Mercury Communications was beating the digital drum, we broke BT’s monopoly and created new services that had just not been possible in the previous analogue world...

‘Innovation’ is an overused buzzword for this one very simple reason – just about every company wants to be seen to be innovative. But are our most innovative products actually the most profitable for us? Most would agree that ‘new’ for new’s sake actually makes little sense, yet it is also natural for Product Managers to feel the weight of responsibility in developing new technologies or ideas that will disrupt and shift their market to the advantage of their organisation...

Business Systems company Idea Group is delighted to announce that respected financial services industry professional Neil Fatharly is to join its newly created Advisory Network.

Success, as it says on many a fridge magnet, is a journey – not a destination. And what a journey we are all on at the moment. It’s fraught with uncertainty and it’s sometimes hard to know what our best course of actions should be. And yet, we can also feel a sense of security in knowing that some things will always be constant. In this context...

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has introduced new rules requiring UK authorised fund managers (AFMs) to assess the overall value that their authorised funds deliver to investors, and to publish a summary of these assessments annually. This will be the first time that AFMs have had to justify their pricing and consumer benefits publicly, and it will be important from a reputational, as well as regulatory perspective to produce a credible assessment of the value delivered...

In our increasingly regulated world, we need enterprise solutions to manage risk. But while the governance of financial regulation is taking up more and more senior management time it is still common to product teams embracing 'citizen' solutions – and all the risks that go with them...

The product launch is the climax of all your hard work as a Product Manager. After all the time and effort put into developing the product you always hope for those rave reviews and ‘why didn’t we think of that’ echoes from your competitors. The reason they didn’t ‘think of that’ has nothing to do with brainwaves or lightbulbs. It is almost always to do with robust planning - and the lack of it - in each of these key areas...