The IBOR (Investment Book of Record) is a single source of consolidated data that combines start-of-day and end-of-day positions. It provides an up-to-date view of positions and exposures to help support the investment decision-making process. An Investment Book of Record (IBOR) is the most reliable way to optimize your investment decisions and establish a cross-firm overview of positions and exposure, thus enabling you to track your firm's performance in real time.

ABOR - Accounting Book of Record

An ABOR is a centralized, accounting book of record that can be accessed to support various investment functions and return calculations. It supports basic back- and middle-office functions, such as generating daily net asset value data, and day-to-day fund administration, transfer agency, and custodial services, as well as client and regulatory reporting. An ABOR is focused on costs, on total net asset value, and on charts of accounts. It is critical for determining cash positions, conducting reconciliations and for closing periods.

IBOR - Investment Book of Record

The IBOR goes further, providing users with broader, more granular and real-time views of performance and risk data. IBORs are focused on market price and on start-of-day and even intra-day positions. They support performance returns at the individual position level, with updates applied to historical holdings or open periods. With increasing market and regulatory demands, firms need to take decision-making, compliance and operational efficiency to the next level. That means they need better access to more comprehensive, accurate and timely data. This has become the hallmark of the modern IBOR.

PBOR - Performance Book of Record

PBOR is effectively a superset of IBOR in that it is more granular and covers greater ground. PBOR datasets will typically include investment information, integrated performance results, risk exposure analysis, reference data and adjusted data In essence, PBOR is the platform that enables investment managers to process some of the more complex data sets used in performance measurement and risk analytics providing transparency and visibility into all investments.

MBOR - Multiple Books of Record

Enables companies to set up multiple views within an account structure.

• Information fragmentation across disparate systems, such as separate portfolio management systems (PMS), order management systems (OMS), execution management systems (EMS) and risk management systems.

• Increasing regulatory and institutional investor pressures requiring pre-trade, intra-day, post-trade compliance checks.

• Access to real-time market information, such as news, prices and analytics.

Investment managers had to start relying on adding on separate portfolio, order and execution management systems to perform their trading, performance management and other intra-day activities. While the multiple applications helped to bridge gaps, the approach leads to inaccurate and/or incomplete data across these systems.

For optimal decision-making during market volatility, investment managers need a real-time view of their multi-asset portfolio holdings (positions, valuations, and cash balances), open orders (fills and rejects) and economics of the trade (commissions and brokerage).

The ideal IBOR of today offers real-time processing of the entire investment lifecycle through its cloud native architecture and eliminates the need for multiple systems — resulting in just one system to run end-to-end.

Step #1 - Specify exactly what you want your IBOR to do for you

Across the asset management industry, the understanding of an IBOR varies. Asset managers should therefore qualify the key characteristics for their IBOR, which may include:

• On a trade date basis, it provides start-of-day cash and positions.

• As needed, it reports intraday information on cash, positions and transactions.

• It establishes a “gold copy” of data for several investment management functions, such as attribution, client reporting, performance and risk.

• It empowers asset managers with an additional control and oversight measure of back- office processes.

A clear definition of an IBOR provides a range of benefits.

Step #2 - Establish the business case

As firms define the contours of an IBOR, they should consider doing the same for their business case. The business case for an IBOR generally has three core components: run-rate savings, net investment avoidance and cost growth avoidance.

To assess the IBOR business case, asset managers should fully model the different transformation scenarios—vendor, proprietary technology or outsourcing. By analyzing each, they could not only derive the savings profile, but also the investment required.

Step #3 - Instill proper guidelines and safeguards

The success of a transformational IBOR initiative will require a strong and defined governance structure and cadence. This model will align and maintain expectations and cut through “nubby” issues in a timely manner via communication, transparency and collaboration. The appropriate governance structure connects daily operations to strategic discussions. These interactions help ensure alignment with intent, and this theme needs to extend from actions to outcomes.

Whatever approach is taken, implementing an IBOR solution is not an end unto itself. The real benefit comes from other systems’ use of the data, which means that any implementation needs to include significant reference to those systems as well.

For example, moving from an overnight position refresh of a front office system to an intraday, near real-time or real-time one may require development in the incumbent system to take those refreshes. Having a clear understanding of what an IBOR function should offer and how it will fit into an organisation’s operations, will make an IBOR a key component in mitigating risk across many organisations.

• An Investment Book of Record (IBOR) allows a portfolio manager to execute more informed investment activities. Intraday activities are enhanced with accurate positional information on which investment decisions are executed at any time.

• The manager gains a clear and singular view of their portfolio, with the access to real-time aggregated data, whilst avoiding the inefficiencies of trading.

• As a portfolio manager, you have the advantage of managing your portfolio with all the available information applied rather than having to manage your data.

• The IBOR is reactive to changes and updates as they occur. The front and back-office are now consistently in sync. The key ability of an IBOR is to provide whatever view of position data is required at the time that it’s needed.

• Provides complete, accurate and timely investment and cash positions as and when required by consuming systems, whether these are front office trading, treasury, analysis, reconciliation, reporting and so on.

• Risk monitoring would be a beneficiary of such data an IBOR’s true benefit is about reducing the risk across a firm’s organization – the risk of getting something wrong.