The ultimate guide to research management systems

Executive Summary

A research management system (RMS) may once have been a ‘nice-to-have’ but is now seen as essential in daily investment operations.

A modern RMS is both a system-of-record and a productivity workspace that enables critical processes, workflows and collaboration amid a fast-changing environment; both a way to demonstrate operational excellence and an opportunity to realize performance improvement and competitive advantage.

In the very first 2017 edition of this vendor-neutral market guide, we focused on core RMS functions and compliant record-keeping for fund managers. Today, a new imperative for research management solutions has emerged right across the industry. From GPs/Alternatives to LPs, Allocators, and Traditional Asset Managers, investors of all sizes and strategies are seeking new ways to extract more accountability, productivity, and performance from their investment research operations and rising volumes of data.

Growing demand for open architectures, the continued professionalization of workflows and processes, and an increase in the use of ESG and other alternative data have strengthened the position of RMS at the center of investment processes.

As the RMS category has matured, investment firms have grown to expect seamless adoption via a highly intuitive user experience (UX) and total flexibility and configurability of the RMS platform within their technology and data stack.

Formally or informally, your research is already governed by some form of RMS. Maybe you built it, or bought it, inherited it, or happened upon it through trial and error. It’s time to determine its strategic value. Is it the complete, agile and compliant environment you need to support the most efficient research process possible? Does it deliver the right combination of knowledge, process and data management to provide a competitive edge? This is where our guide will be of use.

Investment professionals don’t question whether they need a RMS. The critical decision is about which RMS approach is best for your needs.

How to use this guide

One size of RMS does not necessarily fit all; you need to identify the solution that best fits your needed requirements. By charting the landscape of RMS options, this guide helps you address these questions and plan the optimum next steps for your firm. Use it to evaluate feature sets, create scenarios and benchmark your existing set-up. Above all, use it to understand the critical role of RMS in the success of your firm.

Through the lens of our changing world

Living with increased volatility, scrutiny, risk and digital dynamism

Much of the value of a core enterprise technology comes from remaining relevant in the face of change. An RMS, so integral to investment research operations, must do this amid expectations that are constantly evolving and situations that are entirely unique to each organization.

Managers across the investment industry are facing significant volatility. 2023 begins in a period of globally high inflation and rising interest rates, continuing geopolitical unrest, increasing concerns about climate change and social equality, and supply chains that are still recovering after the strain of Covid. Short-term volatility is an opportunity for fast data analysis to capitalize on upsides and mitigate downsides, and the treasure trove that is RMS should be easy to unlock and exploit.

But more volatility also invites more probity; more forensic questions aimed at managers demanding to know why certain decisions were made, which opportunities were missed and whether the optimum approach was taken. And that’s just from clients and stakeholders. The encroaching reach of regulators, for example the SEC in its recent ESG data rulings, only adds to the scrutiny.

The answers are in the data, of course, but that isn’t a solution to the problem unless the data required can be surfaced in seconds. And while the ready extraction of valuable insights is of equal importance to the RMS’ role as a compliance tool – the question of who surfaces the data and from where has never been greater. Covid well and truly catapulted the industry into the digital world so that, today, ‘anywhere accessibility’ is table stakes for every newly adopted technology platform. Analysts favor hybrid work rhythms that put them in different places, from different devices, at different times. That’s their way of being productive, and it’s critical that the RMS can harness that, leveraging cloud infrastructure and collaborative digital processes as a critical part of their resilience.

Resilience shouldn’t just be seen through the prism of Covid either. It’s unlikely that the next existential threat will emerge from a biological pathogen – it’s far more likely to be a cyber-borne threat. Any reliance upon technology demands strong internal protections and financial services businesses tend to be among the most secure in the world. However, that needs to extend to the SaaS and cloud ecosystem beyond that, making it more important than ever that firms closely scrutinize the cybersecurity credentials of their RMS vendor.

Challenges of managing investment research

The quality of research, the speed and accuracy of being able to locate and develop ideas, the efficiency of conducting research and diligence so as to enable more opportunities to be generated, progressed and brought to fruition – all these factors and more should drive research management processes on a path of continual improvement.

1. User Experience & Accessibility 

   • No amount of “my way or the highway” hardball with your investment team is going to make them employ a new tool or process unless they like using it and it adds value to their individual workflow. It needs to be logical, responsive and easy to learn. It needs to be flexible to the way they like working.

   • Most importantly, the RMS (and the data you put in it) must be easily accessible to all involved in undertaking, managing, and auditing the research process – wherever they are, and whatever they are doing.

2. Compliance & Reporting

   • The RMS should be the authoritative system-of-record for research data. Applying this principle – a single digital record of all your research assets and diligence activity – is vitally important in demonstrating the care taken to support your fiduciary duties. The same goes for all other compliance requirements stipulated by the SEC and other global regulatory authorities, from Books & Records and Compliance Procedures to Regulatory S-P, GDPR, MiFID II and much more.

3. Cybersecurity  

   • The sensitive, high-value nature of financial data and Intellectual Property (IP) make this industry an obvious target for cybercriminals. Regulators scrutinize how investment firms prevent, detect and respond to cybersecurity threats; how they proactively monitor cyber posture and produce evidence on its effectiveness.

   • The system-of-record principle is also the basis for delivering this, and securing the organization and its records from the threat of data.

     loss, exploitation and malicious attack. Some elements of RMS security should be a given: two-factor authentication and encrypted information during transit and at rest, but flexibility and mobility can attract additional security risks, so the RMS approach also needs to be capable of achieving these capabilities in a secure fashion.

4. Visibility & Monitoring 

   • Gaining granular, on-demand insight into the research and diligence process can often be painful and time-consuming. Lacking this visibility impacts risk management and is a missed opportunity to generate intelligence that can drive process improvement and better investment decisions.

   • A good objective is to be no more than a few seconds away from any research-related question you – or an external auditor – might care to ask. A modern RMS should be highly configurable to provide dashboards for everything from compliance management, research project and task status, to document update requirements, personal performance appraisals and monitoring of investment objectives against patterns of activity.

5. Integration of Data, Systems & Workflow

   • A major problem with investment research data is how it gets categorized, named and stored in increasingly large and complex file directory structures. The inevitable descent into chaos typically leads to an inflexible response (e.g., intricate naming conventions or file trees) that analysts struggle to adhere to.

   • Investment professionals work the way they want to, and –to a certain extentthe RMS needs to cope with that. The RMS should be able to facilitate the integration of their working practices, along with other systems and preferred third-party data, within a collaborative team environment. This helps avoid duplication of work and makes the research process smoother, while auditing spot tests or diligence checks becomes simple and painless.

A question to consider

So how do the available RMS solutions on the market stack up against these requirements? To help answer this question, the next section of this guide explains the brief history of RMS and its evolution into distinct categories.

The evolution of RMS

Stage 1: The first research management systems are created, but limitations soon emerge

The very first attempts to store, analyze and report on the research data generated by different analysts within a common management system involved shared folders and drives on the company’s internal network. When this became too complex, inefficient or risky, the natural evolutionary path was to painstakingly, gradually, and rather expensively develop their own bespoke software.

Then, around 20 years ago, several software vendors entered the market to create the first commercially available Research Management Systems (‘RMS’ was first coined in 2004-5) by applying methods of knowledge and document management already developed for other industries.

The impetus for these applications (both bespoke and off-the-shelf) and their ability to store and record research assets for pre-trade recommendations was to meet compliance requirements and establish a consolidated system-of-record. Ease of use, and sensitivity to analysts’ research practice took a back seat to the generic software development priorities of document management and data governance.

Owing to their cost and size, both application approaches remained beyond the reach of all but the largest institutions during this period. Both were slow to react to changing market conditions and external tech innovations. As a result, many implementations were unpopular, and ultimately unsuccessful.

Stage 2: Formal RMS approaches never fully catch on, and informal tools and processes start filling the void

Despite ‘formal’ approaches to RMS having been around for almost two decades, such systems are not yet ubiquitous. A 2020 buy-side survey by Coalition Greenwich found that 74% of investment organizations still had no formal RMS tools in place at all. That raises the question, “What are they using?”

To answer that, consider how every research analyst has their own preferred way of working. The mass market arrival of consumer-based technology tools for storage and collaboration (from around 2010 onwards) had a revolutionary effect on many. These ‘app store’ tools equipped analysts with enough informal workarounds and ‘hacks’ to optimize performance, whatever their individual role or work style.

The consumerization of enterprise IT overtook many traditional applications, but RMS was particularly vulnerable. Analysts value responsiveness, smooth functionality and familiar, easy-to-use interfaces. They value mobility and flexibility. And where traditional RMS lacked these attributes, consumer-led software had them in abundance. They found ways of ‘hacking’ lightweight integrations between office apps (like Outlook, Word and Excel), shared file drives (like Google Drive, Dropbox – or a drive on the company network) and note-taking programs (like Evernote and OneNote). The ends justified the means, especially for analysts at smaller firms where established RMS approaches were always beyond reach.

The significant downside of all this was an immediate decline in research visibility, accountability, data security and compliance. Instead of being widely visible and fluid, data and workflows retrenched back into silos. Analysts benefited from a great leap forward in research infrastructure but, in doing so, firms took a big step back in terms of corporate governance.

Stage 3: Modern approaches to RMS arrive to address firm objectives and user demands in a compliant way

The need for a formalized research management approach has never been greater. Today, the bar is significantly higher for legacy RMS vendors and new entrants alike to address the multiple, often conflicting, requirements of investment organizations, regulatory bodies and top research analyst talent.

When individual analysts leave their jobs and take their research IP with them, the potential loss of tribal knowledge presents a significant operational risk. This is exacerbated when informal, non-sanctioned and undocumented approaches are used. Modern RMS seeks to better institutionalize knowledge to address this universal industry challenge.

Modern RMS approaches are also significantly more likely to be software-led, user-driven, highly configurable and fit to be fully integrated with each organization’s own unique data sources and workflows. The best examples of Modern RMS have compliance capabilities built in and consider end-to-end investment workflows. Their scalable design, open interoperability and cost-competitive pricing models also make them more accessible to customers of all sizes.

The result of all this evolution has fractured the original DNA of RMS into distinct species. Next, we define each of these in turn, and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

The four species of RMS today 

The evolution of RMS provides Investment Managers and CTOs with a wide choice of options when considering how best to support their research management processes.

These are:

1. Bespoke RMS
2. Traditional RMS
3. Consumer Tech Hacks
4. Modern RMS

1. Bespoke RMS

Investors that embark on the bespoke path commit themselves to building, instead of buying, their way to a solution that serves their unique needs at the time. This approach is adopted by firms with the time, internal IT resources, experience and budget necessary to pull off major software and infrastructure projects.

The scale of required resources is not to be underestimated; often at least two full-time people working for two years consuming a total technology budget in excess of $1m. The great benefits of getting it right are balanced by the high risks of getting it wrong.

2. Traditional RMS

Although commercial offerings within this category never quite reached mass-market adoption, a sizable cohort of large firms implemented these solutions, and a significant proportion of experienced investment professionals will be familiar with a traditional RMS.

Such solutions have not aged well, particularly in terms of user interfaces, application responsiveness and mobile integration. Compliance officers are more likely to favor keeping hold of these traditional RMS assets, as each has been developed from a fund control and compliance perspective, rather than for usability. The traditional RMS is usually a legacy and rarely, if ever, found in newer implementations.

3. Consumer Tech Hacks

The adoption of this amorphous family of tricks and tools – from Evernote/OneNote to Dropbox/Box and everything in between – emerged in response to the deficiencies of traditional RMS and has been driven by the individual preferences and sheer expediency of research analysts. The ultimate ‘workaround’ was precipitated by the ingenuity of analysts ‘hacking’ new processes and data integrations from a mixture of the corporate IT tools they’d been given and new tools accessible from the public cloud.

Such approaches have since drifted from informal to semi-informal; facilitated rather than mandated (or, to put it another way: permitted rather than sanctioned) by executive and IT leadership at investment organizations.

What they lack in watertight compliance, they make up for in usability and agility. Speed and cost of deployment is very low. However, some firms are frightened off by the scarcity of control, visibility and accountability, while others – worryingly – don’t even know that their research analysts work this way to conduct ‘RMS’ activities; a phenomenon known as ‘Shadow IT’ or ‘Shadow Data’.

4. Modern RMS

By combining the compliant, system-of-record orientated approach of traditional RMS, with the configurability of bespoke approaches and the usable, automated, web-scale characteristics of consumer technology hacks, Modern RMS attempts to accomplish the best of all worlds. The functionality is there, but adoption barriers remain. These include the inertia of some organizations to transition away from their existing RMS set-ups and a lack of awareness in some quarters for the difference a fit-for-purpose RMS can play in boosting performance and assuring compliance.

Some market data providers have crowded this market segment with what analysts in the industry describe as ‘RMS-lite’ products. These stripped-down solutions exhibit some of the analytics and user interface characteristics of

Modern RMS, but lack the productivity features, workflow automation and compliance support that research IP demands. In some cases, they even fuel the misconception that an RMS is essentially little more than a note-taking application or add-on. Care should be taken to understand the distinction between these ‘lite’ approaches within the Modern RMS category of products, particularly regarding the effect this has upon compliance, security posture and process management.

How to evaluate RMS options for your firm 

1. Internal Resources:
   • How are your internal resources geared up to implement and manage an effective RMS?
   • A build-your-own approach will only be within reach for those with the deepest pockets and biggest in-house development resources.
   • Regardless of approach, one should also consider the numerous data sources and adjacent enterprise applications you may wish to integrate with your RMS and how this can be accomplished.
2. Further questions to consider:
   • Should having large internal resources drive your business to pursue RMS approaches that necessitate them?
   • Are internal resources currently overstretched, or is there available capacity?
   • Could a different approach to RMS present opportunities to streamline internal overheads and remove cost and complexity?

Take each RMS approach in turn to consider the relative pros and cons.

1. When considering Bespoke IT

   1. Development requires a large IT team with significant internal skills, staff and infrastructure.
   2. Planning, building, testing and implementing can take well over 18 months in some cases.
   3. These painstaking activities facilitate the ‘baking-in’ of highly compliant and secure processes that precisely meet uniquebusiness needs and satisfy current analyst user preferences at that point in time.
   4. Upgrades and updates are typically time-consuming and resource-intensive.
   5. Major ongoing management, maintenance and development is essential to keep pace with technology developments, opportunities and new compliance requirements.

2. When considering Traditional RMS

   1. Systems are pre-built and mature, so little – if any – initial internal development resources are required.
   2. However, customization and integration of traditional RMS can take a long time – around 12 months – to get right, and professional services often come at additional cost.
   3. Although improving, Traditional RMS typically remains feature-limited for key industry workflows, collaboration and mobile needs – so if you need these, you may have to develop and integrate them yourself.
   4. Analysts are typically reluctant to have traditional RMS imposed upon them, owing to its rigidity and disruption to preferred working practices. Adoption can require heavy, ongoing project management and new procedures for IT governance and compliance.
   5. Upgrades and updates are typically rare and sporadic in nature (usually every 9 – 12 months) and can be frustrating and often disruptive.

3. When considering Consumer Tech Hacks

   1. Little, if any, internal resources are required to develop or implement these technologies, making it ideal for very small organizations that want to move fast.
   2. The user-friendly and highly intuitive interfaces of these tools mean they are rapidly adopted.
   3. Any problems with adoption can be rapidly and cost-effectively executed by replacing with other similar tools according to individual preference.
   4. Lack of integration with other industry-specific tools and workflows, lack of compliance governance and exposure to cybersecurity risk are all significant draw backs to this approach that necessitate significant investments in internal resources to put right.
   5. Where upgrades and updates exist they reflect consumer trends only, rather than corporate enterprise imperatives (let alone investment management requirements). There are seldom any vendor SLAs, especially for free tools, many of which can be withdrawn from the market or left unsupported without notice.

4. When considering Modern RMS

   1. Like traditional RMS, modern RMS components are pre-built and relatively mature, so no initial development resources are required.
   2. Similarly, customization and integration will need to be undertaken to suit the specific needs of the investment firm, its research processes and the people who use it. However, these processes are significantly simpler and faster with many modern RMS – with published APIs readily available and highly configured implementations typically achieved in less than one month.
   3. Ease of use is akin to familiar consumer technology applications, typically leading to rapid and successful user adoption.
   4. Compliance safeguards are available ‘out-of-the-box’ with limited burden upon internal resources for tuning or training.
   5. Updates and upgrades are typically made as part of a continuous process (e.g., two-week cycles, though this varies vendor by vendor), meaning minimal disruption to the user experience. Modern RMS delivered via SaaS means updates are performed centrally rather than at each customer site.

IT Consumption Model

The delivery and management of your chosen RMS solution will have important implications for your internal resources, governance oversight and IT strategy. Choosing wisely from available IT consumption models is a prime opportunity to ensure your objectives are fully realized.

On-premise IT has become a less common consumption model for RMS, typically employed only by institutions that are highly sensitive about the physical location of IT assets. On-premise IT comes with its own responsibilities for application delivery and management, making it unviable for organizations operating a streamlined IT function. ESG data rulings, only adds to the scrutiny.

The predominant model is now cloud-based, particularly since the upheaval of Covid and its aftermath. Cloud infrastructure and mobile-first strategies have been critical enablers to business continuity and resilience to the extent that any remaining on-premise IT across their investment companies’ estates will likely be in the process of shifting to SaaS (software-as-a-service) consumption.

A private cloud-based SaaS solution will allow your users (and managers) to access the RMS from anywhere, anytime. Additionally, the RMS vendor manages the burden of securing and maintaining the hardware, software, and application. SaaS is consumed and paid for on an ongoing basis, rather than as a capital investment. The other consumption model of note is outsourcing, using managed service providers (MSPs) to host your on-premise instances within their facilities. Deriving IT services from MSPs exploits the middle-ground between doing it all in-house and deriving an IT capability as-a-service directly from the technology vendor. Commercial models differ, but MSPs are often able to spread the cost of technology into an OPEX model rather than CAPEX. There are currently no MSPs known to offer an RMS solution on an OPEX basis, but this may change in the future.

The remaining major IT consumption model is, of course, public cloud. This is how individuals and organizations consume IT services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote. It is not considered ‘enterprise-grade’ for security, compliance and application assurance purposes.

ESG

Other alternative data and increasing complexity

As demand for responsible investments continues to grow, asset managers and asset owners increasingly seek to include Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria in investment processes and incorporate sustainability into day-to-day decisions and reporting.

We are seeing this rising demand for greater transparency and better returns increasing the need for all kinds of alternative data and systems that can handle complex, novel information.

Ingesting, applying and exploiting ESG data is now a necessity. Investment professionals without the appropriate technologies in place to handle the influx of unstructured data are scrambling to tape together ad hoc tools just to get by.

Ultimately, an ESG-friendly RMS solution needs to support capabilities such as:

• Tracking and recording ESG-related meetings notes and records arising from interactions with brokers and key contacts. Such data should be captured and tagged in order to be rapidly and easily searchable.
• Integrating third-party ESG datasources into your overall view of data and metrics. This should be done in an automated way with no additional data processing overheads.
• Enabling dashboard-level oversight of anything, through an ESG lens. This should play to the strengths of a good, modern RMS that’s totally configurable to proprietary requirements.
• Rapid ESG reporting for internal or external stakeholders. Whether in response to market volatility pressures, governance questionnaires or compliance mandates–accurate reports able to answer any conceivable ESG-related question will be required extremely quickly.
• Streamlined ESG proxy voting via workflow automation. By integrating third-party proxy voting provider functionality into the RMS workflow, managers never miss a vote and all voting choices can be executed with confidence because all supporting research data is on hand.

Take a moment to project your team’s use of ESG and alternative data, and how well each potential RMS approach can handle the unstructured information. Investment professionals looking to be proactive, rather than reactive, must prioritize systems that have the ability to customize and tailor dashboards and APIs to process all this new data.

Older legacy systems built on all-in-one scaffolding tend to be closed off to certain subsets of data. If your research involves more boutique data firms, it might be in your best interest to try out a best-of-breed solution, which will enable you to connect with whichever data providers meet your demands.

All-in-one vs. Best of Breed

What is the difference, and why does it matter?

What is the difference between an all-in-one (or one-stop-shop) provider and best-of-breed software suppliers, and why does it matter?

Even as you compile a shortlist of four to five initial RMS vendors for evaluation, it is likely you will need to address this question along the way.

At a glance

An all-in-one provider offers multiple applications under one roof. Rather than achieving a focused core competency and functionality in any given product category, it trades on the promise of interoperability or cost-effectiveness across many.

In contrast, best-of-breed vendors focus solely on delivering only the most advanced solution for a specific requirement.

The value of functionality and specialization

Although some one-stop-shop vendors may claim each of their connected application/s is a superior solution, it is well understood that all individual modules are rarely best-of-breed.

In contrast, a best-of-breed software company solely builds and supports an application or product within its core area of expertise. This level of focus tends to result in software solutions that are fine-tuned, continually, to suit exact business needs.

However, it is also important to evaluate the value you place on a vendor’s specialization beyond their feature offerings.

For example, having a single provider across many applications could theoretically imply a more straightforward support resolution. In practice, support teams for large, multi-solution organizations often don’t have the in-depth knowledge about the specific module of your solution, or specialist workflows or configurations, that you’d find with best-of-breed vendors. Be sure to extend your diligence on product category expertise for your ongoing service and support requirements too – which should be weighed up against the impact on user experience, accessibility and compliance.

How easy is integration, really?

This question obviously applies to best-of-breed solutions, where the different parts of your technology stack are designed and produced by different companies. In the past, maintaining multiple best-of-breed systems provided little cross-connectivity and required significant in house maintenance, integration expertise and resources.

However, the rise of modern open architectures and API-led platforms has changed this narrative to one of interoperable application ecosystems. Integration between certain best-of-breed RMS and other best-of-breed systems in the investor technology stack is now fast, cost-effective and often preferred.

This question of integration, however, can also apply to multi-solution vendors that are acquisitive or may be acquired. There are a number of RMS solutions that could fall under this category, where larger technology providers have acquired previously best-of-breed solutions to fill functionality gaps. When assessing any solution provider’s RMS offering – it is equally important to fully evaluate interoperability, integration and flexibility along with functionality.

A focus on releases, responsiveness and R&D

Whether it’s time taken to fix bugs, how often feature updates are released, or responsiveness to client functionality requests – a best-of-breed provider will point all its product and engineering resources toward this.

The opposite is usually true for large, one-stop-shop organizations offering RMS. Here, the RMS is one string to a much broader bow, in an even larger orchestra. It’s one of the reasons why upgrades and updates to RMS from larger multi-solution organizations are slower and more sporadic in nature. Updates are usually released every 6 – 9 months.

When you’re evaluating vendors, be sure to scrutinize their continuous innovation and R&D efforts into the specific product category.

In summary:

Choosing between a best-of-breed solution, designed purposefully to address a specific business need, or an all-in-one/one-stop-shop approach for multiple products, is not a new debate, or one that is unique to the investment management world.

However, we are now seeing more ecosystems of complementary providers that can integrate disparate tools and technologies across their investment lifecycle.

As these options increase, interoperability considerations are playing a larger part in RMS evaluations, and with the rise of integration-agnostic platforms, open and comprehensive API documentation is becoming a core competency of many providers.

10 RMS pitfalls to avoid

Whether you choose to evolve your current approach or not, keep your eyes open to the ten most common pitfalls associated with RMS.

1. Spending so long implementing and tuning your RMS that you cannot keep pace with evolving demands and opportunities.
2. Choosing a partial, quick-fix, RMS-lite solution instead of a ground-up approach that meets the evolving needs of your investment strategy and compliance obligations.
3. Failing to enshrine the principle that the RMS should act as the authoritative system-of-record for your research.
4. Paying excessive professional services costs related to RMS integration and ongoing configuration requirements.
5. Over-reliance upon manual RMS data processing instead of enabling automation to speed up processes and reduce overheads.
6. Constricting research analysts by imposing a rigid RMS methodology rather than a framework that can accommodate and enhance their workflows.
7. Lack of balance between compliance on the one hand, and usability on the other– causing you to choose one over the other when selecting your RMS.
8. Investing faith in analysts to find robust, compliant, accountable and secure RMS solutions when you give them carte blanche to ‘hack’ the most productive approach to managing research data using consumer technologies.
9. Overlooking the importance of mobile access and intuitive collaboration in yourRMS solution as catalysts for better investment outcomes.
10. Signing up to periodic software upgrades that force users to repeatedly reacquaint themselves with the RMS, and adjust their working practices accordingly.

Conclusion

The RMS plays an important role in investment success, assuring transparency and compliance and driving greater productivity and accuracy into research processes.

An effective RMS is accommodating to the point of invisibility. An ineffective one is obtrusive and meddlesome. Implementation and configuration should be rapid and using the RMS should be frictionless. Nobody should have to think about the RMS as they go about their work.

While the value of formal over informal RMS approaches is clear, the very fact that lightweight, consumer-driven technology hacks have achieved traction says much about the compelling advantages of an intuitive user interface that accommodates the dynamic and hybrid working practices of today’s investment professionals.

Investors have the opportunity to reassess the role of a formal RMS in their research processes and explore new solutions that best satisfy a range of business objectives, including investment strategy, risk profile, compliance posture, costbase, and most efficient use of internal IT resources. This will not only provide a robust tool-set for facilitating optimum research processes, but also act as the platform for future development; a valuable asset supporting research improvement long into the future.