Application Integration Use Cases for Investment Firms

Succeeding at investing is all about recognizing trends and acting on them before the rest of the world catches on. There’s a particular art to investment banking. It requires patience and the resolve to hold onto an asset for dear life no matter how much the markets say you should sell. While you won’t profit from every deal, the goal is to win—and win big—more than you lose.

If you run an investment firm for stockholders who are passive investors, they’re relying on you to make their contribution to the passive fund profitable. The stock market can change at the blink of an eye, and even with all your fancy tech, if your enterprise software programs are information silos, it will cost your shareholders in dividends. Continue reading to see how enterprise application integration is essential to streamlining key processes and weathering the stock market’s volatility.

Managing passive investments requires an active business intelligence strategy

A common misconception is that passive investing means sleeping at the wheel is your investment strategy. Whether you’re managing a mutual fund or equity investment portfolio, it’s critical to stay abreast of what’s going on in the stock markets.

Passive investments aren’t as volatile as equity investments, but applying business intelligence to your passive investing strategy can help you forecast trends long before they hit. By data mining to find obscure trends in history and the markets, you can extract actionable insights and apply predictive modeling to forecast trends and changes yet to come like a passive investment savant.

Using data visualization, you can turn the raw data into colorful, artistic infographics that are more pleasing to the eyes and easier to interpret than raw data. Converting metrics into infographics transforms your data into a language that all of your team members can understand, making for a quicker, more fluid decision-making process.

Integrating new applications into your existing system isn’t as easy as it seems

When your programs speak different languages and refuse to share critical information with each other, you have the enterprise infrastructure equivalent of the United States and Russia. One of the best things about the latest wave of enterprise applications is their ability to work harmoniously.

With an enterprise application integration platform, your system can streamline data and transcend silos. With that increased agility of information, your portfolio managers can make crucial adjustments to investment strategies in the blink of an eye. Furthermore, the liquidity of data across multiple platforms that “middleware” provides is critical to ensuring the integrity of your data when sharing inside your network.

Old applications come with hidden costs

You should know from passive investing that not everything appreciates value with time, which applies to legacy enterprise software. It’s intuitive for a passive investor to be wary of investing in a new enterprise infrastructure if the current one is functioning. However, it would be best if you stopped to ask yourself how well it’s performing. Legacy symptoms that go on the fritz every time they try to process new information are much more costly to repair over and again than they are to replace. Not to mention, software and hardware are like bodies and brains, with, of course, software being analogous to brains and hardware to bodies. Brains transform much more quickly and frequently than bodies, and the same applies to software and hardware.

Just because you have machines capable of managing your processes doesn’t mean the brains of those machines are up to par. Integrating new applications into your current infrastructure will help your business run more efficiently and help you cut operational and repair costs along the way.