Live data feeds dead on arrival

Financial planners are becoming increasingly frustrated with unreliable investment product data feeds within their financial planning software systems.

Mandy Penkin, chief operating officer at Avenue Capital Management, said while the software used by the group (XPlan) was quite good, its effectiveness was being hampered by the accuracy of the data feed from the investment product providers.

“When you want to get a portfolio valuation report for the client, across multiple fund managers, you can’t rely on the accuracy of the data feed, so you have to go to each individual product supplier’s site and log in, get a report and manually key it into other documents,” Penkin said.

Another problem Penkin highlighted was that even where accurate data was provided, “if a client sells off their portfolio, the providers won’t provide accurate closing transactions for the account”.

Jenny Powell, director of Powell Capel Securities, agreed that investment product providers are not providing sufficiently updated information to financial planning software companies for live data feeds.

Powell said her planning group had “tried using the live data feeds from fund managers, but nothing ever reconciled”.

Powell said the advisers within her business were spending so long correcting clients’ portfolio information within the software system they ultimately stopped using the data feeds altogether.

Michal Kinens, IRESS senior business development executive, wealth management solutions, said the group was being “hamstrung” by fund managers that weren’t providing correct data information for the live data feeds for their XPlan software.

“We have hundreds of advisers bombarding our helpdesk wanting to get an answer to the problem that was created downstream,” Kinens said.

“If I don’t get the correct information from the fund managers, obviously what I can report back to my client can’t be accurate,” Kinens said.

Kinens told Money Management that IRESS had created new technology, called IRESS-Net, with the intention of allowing the company to pinpoint the product providers that were failing in the area of data reconciliation and send requests to rectify the issue.

However, despite the solution, Kinens said the software company was finding it hard to even get a response from some providers in regards to fixing the problem.

The head of product and technology at Macquarie Adviser Services, Tony Graham, said it was up to the software companies to contact them for updated product data feeds.