Sailing
blind.
Portfolios are still run on judgement — on spreadsheets nobody dares to touch. When the sea rises, sailing blind is no longer enough.
Investment operations still run on spreadsheets.
Your managers spend their mornings consolidating — instead of advising the clients who pay your fees.
Every custodian speaks its own language. You translate by hand.
Formats that will not reconcile
Opposing sign conventions, shifted value dates, silent cancellations, in-house labels. One custodian books a position as negative, another does the opposite; one dates at trade, the other at settlement. Every custodian is a special case — and every reconciliation an investigation.
Calculations without a safety net
Multi-currency TWR, Lombard accounts, structured products, performance net of fees: demanding calculations, carried by files nobody dares to edit. One broken cell, and a false client report goes out — no exception raised, no audit trail, no way back.
Regulatory pressure
MiFID suitability, audit trail, client reporting, fee justification: the requirement rises with every account. Headcount does not. What held across ten clients becomes unmanageable across a hundred.
Every new client adds operational load. Your growth is capped by your capacity to consolidate — not by your capacity to manage money.
The ceiling is invisible. While the underlying work stays manual, hiring costs more than it returns, and operational risk grows with assets under management. The spreadsheet does not break your firm — it stops it growing.