Near Real-time Portfolio Reporting Platform for Axioma

SOUTHWORKS x Axioma Case Study

Context

Axioma’s analytics suite provides investment management solutions to a global client base, including asset managers, asset owners, hedge funds, wealth managers and sell-side firms.

The company offers an award-winning suite of quantitative risk analytics, portfolio construction tools and regulatory reporting solutions. Clients rely on Axioma analytics for decision intelligence and they wanted to deliver this to end users even more quickly, comprehensively, and accurately. What they needed was an enhanced end-to-end reporting platform that was even faster, more efficient through a readily scalable solution.

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‍So Axioma turned to SOUTHWORKS

‍At SOUTHWORKS, we understand the importance of data engineering in the financial industry. That’s why we were proud to help Axioma with the challenge of transforming the existing process to build the new set of tools for tomorrow: aiming to reduce friction, take accuracy to the next level and deliver a new standard for reporting.

‍The platform was built to deal with thousands of portfolios and thousands of instruments, but it presented a bottleneck upon integrating the result of millions of calculated positions with the report generation process.

The objective of the enhanced platform is to deliver up-to-date, fast, and accurate reports on the instruments within an end-user’s portfolio in near-real-time, enabling better financial decision making.

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"SOUTHWORKS really delivered for us. They were able to provide the resources we needed to start work quickly and were able to adapt as our needs changed over the course of the project".

Mark Traudt, Managing Director, Analytics Engineering

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Solution

The process of generating portfolio reports was transformed into a 100% automated, efficient, and scalable solution. The traditional relational, row-based databases like MSSQL were replaced with a columnar alternative that better suits the required scenario, which can be better exploited by the data visualization tool of choice to provide an end-to-end compelling solution.

The ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, centered on Snowflake, was meticulously crafted to encompass data ingestion, cleansing, and augmentation via mapping strategies. Engineered for both scalability and flexibility, it stands ready to accommodate the platform’s future growth and evolution.

At the heart of this platform lie .NET services, seamlessly integrated within Azure Service Fabric, offering APIs to facilitate the orchestration of report creation from the ground up. These

APIs not only trigger ETL processes but also play a pivotal role in the overarching orchestration process that culminates in the generation and seamless delivery of reports to end-users. Snowflake serves as the cornerstone of this architecture, providing a columnar-based, horizontally partitioned data storage solution that aligns perfectly with the project’s unique requirements. Complementing this robust infrastructure, Tableau serves as the Business Intelligence (BI) and report generation tool, harnessing advanced graphs and widgets to deliver a captivating, interactive experience for end-users.

The design and creation of Snowflake tables and schemas (datamarts), along with the infra provisioning and deployment to host all required backend services, were a key component in the successful deployment of the platform. These were implemented to be scalable and flexible, allowing for future expansion and evolution of the platform as needed.

"The SOUTHWORKS Fireteam were able to come up to speed quickly and, leveraging their cloud development expertise, made important contributions to architecture and technology choices. The Scrum process followed by the team provided complete transparency as to requirements, priorities, and progress. The team delivered on schedule, including documentation and training for our internal development team to ensure a smooth transition at the end of the project".

Stephen Belknap,Technical Lead, Analytics Engineering

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Results

From idea to scale with Development on Demand:

‍SOUTHWORKS’ domain knowledge and consistent Fireteam-based process allowed us to turn the idea quickly and effectively into a scalable solution. Our expertise in data engineering, combined with our commitment to delivering quick strategic wins, enabled Axioma to bring its next-gen platform to life to deliver unparalleled intelligence at speed.

100% automated, efficient, and scalable:

‍The new automated portfolio reporting platform reduced the need for human intervention, reduced time spent, and reduced errors, transforming the process into a fast, accurate, and scalable solution that empowers financial decision making.

Near-real-time reporting, performant solution:

‍The platform’s use of components such as Tableau and Snowflake, along with the design and creation of Snowflake tables and schemas and the infra provisioning and deployment, has made it possible to deliver up-to-date, fast, and accurate reports in near-real-time, taking the solution to the next level. This, in addition, to using Azure Service Fabric as a high-scalable job orchestrator were key selections to achieve the expected level of service to portfolio holders.

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Are you ready to transform your data reporting processes into fast, accurate, and scalable solutions?

Need real-time insights but are working with an existing batch process? Contact SOUTHWORKS today - Our no hand-holding, no do-overs team is here to bring you world-class engineering talent in short burst sprints to help you go from stuck to scaled, one week at a time.