Technology is never a differentiator in itself. Creating a competitive advantage depends on finding applications of that technology to better serve customers. The distinction may seem obvious, but as fund administrators expand investments in data operations,...

How Elon Musk and a Depression-era self-help book can guide Wall Street forward What do the Oracle of Omaha, America’s Money Manager and the Technoking of Tesla all have in common? Cool nicknames, for sure. But Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch and Elon Musk have other...

Fund administrators and everyone else seeking to grow their business might want to consider Harmonate Chief Technology Officer Richard Scheffrin’s book recommendations. Richard has been moving recently from a tech-heavy reading to a diet of texts on business strategy...

Automating back-office tasks is the way of the future. It’s the indelible image of market upheaval. Whenever there’s a hiccup on Wall Street – boom or bust – the financial press runs photographs of brokers on a trading room floor. Their hair is mussed up. Their ties...

Complex systems are necessarily fragile. One change can throw everything into chaos. Like the puzzle game Jenga, a technology stack might fit together to form a beautiful structure. But if someone takes away a piece or adds another to a wrong place, disaster can...

New innovative platforms can help realize efficiencies and unlock the potential of private capital. Everyone in the financial sectors knows that the process of signing up new clients for Limited Partnerships is antiquated, time consuming and error prone. But even many...

When funds need to solve one specific data problem, they’re creating an opportunity to discover how data operations can deliver broader efficiencies and savings. A fund administrator was having data problems in its securities business. They reached out to data...

Charles Lyell, a 19th century Scottish polymath, once said, "Never call an accountant a credit to his profession. A good accountant is a debit to his profession." It’s hard not to respect an accounting joke that still stands up after a couple hundred years. But the...