CHARLES RIVER: ENABLING INVESTORS TO ACT WITH CONFIDENCE

Cameron Field, Managing Director, Asia Pacific discusses Charles River’s key differentiators with WealthBriefing’s Tom Burroughes.

Acclaim Magazine 2018 CHARLES RIVER: ENABLING INVESTORS TO ACT WITH CONFIDENCE

Cameron Field, Managing Director, Asia Pacific discusses Charles River’s key differentiators with WealthBriefing’s Tom Burroughes.

August 2018

Charles River serves over 300 buy side Institutional and Wealth Management clients in 40 countries. Over half of the top 50 investment managers globally rely on the Charles River Investment Management Solution (Charles River IMS) to manage over $25 trillion in assets. More than 25,000 professionals worldwide depend on Charles River to improve investment decision making, streamline operations, and lower risk.

Charles River IMS is a multi-asset, multi-currency, institutional-class solution providing integrated data, portfolio management and risk analytics, performance measurement and attribution, compliance, and trading. Built on the Charles River IMS, the Wealth Management Solution helps private banks, wealth managers, and financial advisors support all products on a single, highly-scalable platform that accommodates thousands of users and millions of accounts. It supports both broad asset allocation strategies and tailored portfolio strategies at the single account, client, and household-level.

The platform provides comprehensive asset allocation, portfolio construction, drift monitoring, and mass rebalancing capabilities. Integrated compliance and risk management helps ensure alignment with client risk preferences and product suitability guidelines. This in turn helps minimize reputational risk and potential payouts to clients.

The solution supports all wealth account structures, including the ability to view households and provides the ability to overlay strategies on accounts. This allows the incorporation of sub-advised mandates and model-based portfolios. Cloud-based technology delivery is designed to ensure current functionality, improved data quality, and the latest cybersecurity.

What is your firm’s extra factor that explains why you won this award?

Charles River’s significant annual research and development investment helps ensure continuous innovation and improvement across the entire platform and enables more responsive and personalized levels of client service. Local Asia Pacific offices include Melbourne, Tokyo, and Beijing.

Technology backbone improvements have enhanced Charles River’s scalability to meet the requirements of the largest wealth  management firms, eliminating the need for disparate systems and enabling consolidated and streamlined operations. Configurable dashboards with extensive drill-down capabilities alert advisors to accounts requiring attention and allow advisors to take immediate action when needed.

Sophisticated wealth clients are demanding greater choice of investment vehicles and are favouring comprehensive, multi-product investment solutions over product-specific portfolios. Charles River technology helps managers support complex sub-advised mandates efficiently while minimizing performance dispersion.


“CHARLES RIVER’S SIGNIFICANT ANNUAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT INVESTMENT HELPS ENSURE CONTINUOUS INNOVATION AND IMPROVEMENT ACROSS THE ENTIRE PLATFORM AND ENABLES MORE RESPONSIVE AND PERSONALIZED LEVELS OF CLIENT SERVICE.”

– Cameron Field, Managing Director, Asia Pacific


Charles River has also invested significant resources in desktop, browser, and mobile tools that help improve financial advisor productivity and provide faster access to key client information and facilitate improved engagement with high-touch client relationships.

From portfolio construction and asset allocation through to performance attribution and multi-custodial position management and reconciliation, Charles River streamlines deployment of advisor-driven strategies. The platform enables advisors to implement high-conviction investment themes across their entire book of business and benefit from the same capabilities available to top-tier wealth managers. Additionally, the platform supports centrally managed account monitoring and rebalancing, including Unified Managed Accounts (UMAs).

Firms looking to offer their clients a broader choice of investment products and access to external managers can use Charles River’s Wealth Hub to facilitate coordination between sponsors and sub-advisors. The Hub automates communication of model updates, trades/allocations, positions/cash, and intra-day account instructions. This eliminates reliance on email and multiple applications to upload information separately into each sponsor’s platform.

Explain how you intend to stay out front of the competition.

Charles River currently invests over $60 million annually in research and development and will significantly increase R&D expenditure over the coming years to support the buildout of our end-to-end wealth management platform.

Explain areas where you are pushing forward, such as new products and services.

Charles River continues to expand and enhance wealth management capabilities and functionality. A unified digital experience across desktop, browser, and mobile environments will be a core focus of development over the short term. This digital experience will enable firms to configure capabilities appropriate to the sophistication level of the advisor and their product mix, from basic non-discretionary to fully discretionary.

As a market-leading compliance technology provider, Charles River continues to improve the platform’s enterprise-wide surveillance capabilities. This supports advisor compliance with investment policy statements and alignment with client risk profiles and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) preferences.

Charles River is also expanding risk management capabilities in the platform to provide an improved view of risk and allow advisors to analyse and communicate risk metrics to their clients.