At this year’s Asset Servicing Times Industry Excellence Awards, held in early November, Temenos Multifonds went home with the Funds Technology Provider of the Year award. Managing director Oded Weiss discusses the company’s achievements to date and its plans for the future
Temenos Multifonds offers investment accounting for both traditional and alternative funds, providing a range of services including workflow and exception-driven processing, intelligent reporting, explainable AI capabilities and integrated Investment Book of Records and Accounting Book of Records views across a broad range of assets and jurisdictions.
With data a consistent problem in operations across the industry, Temenos Multifonds gives clients and stakeholders access to operational data through real-time data-marts and flexible business intelligence reporting tools.
Through these provisions, the firm aims to increase operational efficiency for clients, using enhanced automation and explainable AI for exception management.
The service also enables the consolidation of fragmented systems onto a single platform, and supports clients launching new products and entering new markets.
Speaking to AST following the win, Oded Weiss, managing director, discusses the ways in which Temenos Multifonds stands out from the competition, how the company is approaching some of the biggest challenges in the funds industry and what’s in store for the year ahead.
Weiss has been the CEO of Multifonds since 2009. In 2015 he sold Multifonds to Temenos.
What makes Temenos Multifonds stand out from the competition?
“What makes us stand out is our ability to not just send our clients the software to use, but to actually help them use that software in the best, most efficient way,” he says.
“We help them to add more funds, more portfolios, and to use all the efficiencies and capabilities of the platform. That’s something that is distinctive to Multifonds.”
This differentiation has helped the firm to see considerable growth; “today, we have more than 30,000 funds on the platform, and trillions of assets,” Weiss shares.
“We’re the only [company] that has such a good track record.”
Bringing scale to private equity
With the accelerated pace of financial services, “times are more challenging”, Weiss affirms. “Things that used to take years are expected to happen in months, things that used to take months are expected to get done in weeks.” As a result, “we have to be extra focused with our clients,” he says.
Another trial that the funds industry is currently facing is “the retailisation of the private equity space following the revised European Long-Term Investment Fund framework (ELTIF 2.0),” Weiss observes.
Set to apply from January 2024, the ELTIF 2.0 regulation addresses some of the challenges around the original 2015 legislation, including barriers to participation for retail investors, a restricted range of assets that could be invested in and limited diversification within funds.
“Being able to offer the same assets to retail clients is something that everyone is struggling with,” Weiss says. The ability to scale up private equity operations to manage thousands of investors in more complicated structures is the biggest challenge that the industry has to face, he explains, and “there are not many software providers that know how to do that.”
Weiss expects that ELTIF 2.0 marks “the beginning of a trend” of retailisation. “We see it growing now, and we’re confident that it will continue to grow dramatically in 2024 and 2025.” In order to prepare, Temenos Multifonds “has invested quite a lot to be able to help our clients,” he assures.
SaaS and explainable-AI technologies: execution and immediate impact is more important than “buzzwords”
“Everyone’s talking about application programme interfaces (APIs) and software-as-a-solution (SaaS) and generative AI,” Weiss states. “Those are the buzzwords that you hear from everyone.”
But simply talking about the latest trends is not enough, and provides no added value for the client. Weiss emphasises the importance of “finding the right use cases to deploy this technology, finding situations where you can actually have a real impact on the client.”
The Temenos Multifonds platform highlights its use of explainable-AI (XAI) technology, which serves to enhance manual exception reviews. By automatically identifying false positives, resources can be more efficiently allocated to real exceptions and address unprecedented events. The ‘explainable’ part of XAI comes from the human-generated explanations attached to each decision and exception that the technology makes, boosting transparency and scalability of the service.
“There are a lot of companies and fintechs that are telling the same story,” Weiss says. But, at the end of the day, “it’s not just about delivering software or technology” to the client. “It’s about successfully migrating the assets to the platform and helping the client to use it in the best way possible.”
Looking into 2024
As “the only global platform that crosses asset classes and jurisdictions, doing what we do is quite challenging,” Weiss states. Although markets have their own local providers, as a global provider Temenos Multifonds is active across the world.
Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, “we will continue to invest in more markets, in being able to give tier one global administrators and asset managers the ability to run everything, across asset classes and across jurisdictions, on one single platform,” Weiss affirms.
“There’s a lot to do, and a lot to continue to do,” Weiss states, but it’s certain that Temenos Multifonds’ priority will remain on the organisations using its services. “We’re going to continue to invest, extend our reach, extend the depth of our capabilities and support our clients.”
