Iress launches retail investment management data tool

Iress has launched a “first-of-its-kind market intelligence platform” called FundsFlow, aiming to offer a consolidated view of investment flows and trends across Australia’s retail investment management industry.

According to the firm, FundsFlow captures more than $130 billion of annual transaction data across 10,000 unique investments, providing insights across “investment product trends, fund manager competitiveness and investor preferences and behaviour”.

In order to deliver the insights, the tool extracts datasets in a “bottom-up manner” in Xplan, aggregating and analysing portfolio transactions across managed funds, exchange-traded funds (ETF), separately managed accounts and direct equities based on five years of historical data.

“Over many years as Australia’s leading advice platform provider, Iress has garnered an unparalleled dataset reflecting trends and behaviours in retail wealth management. We’re excited to be able to offer these valuable insights to product issuers as they evolve their offerings to better meet the needs of advisers and their clients,” said Simon Karaban, Iress, chief product officer – data.

“We identified a real gap in the market, with existing market intelligence solutions often relying on stale, incomplete and fragmented datasets when it comes to retail wealth flows, resulting in heavy reliance on surveys and anecdotal evidence.”

Karaban added that the new tool delivers a representation of the entire investment management ecosystem in a single location.

“We designed FundsFlow to give investment product issuers and distributors a timely and consolidated view of investment flows, empowering them to quickly adapt to shifting market conditions and competitor dynamics with more answers and fewer lingering questions,” he said.

“We’ve partnered with Quantium, the leading data analytics and AI company, to deliver FundsFlow, bringing critical and complementary capabilities to our solution while enabling us to continue evolving FundsFlow with sophisticated analytics, insights and predictive capabilities.

“We’ve been delighted with the early feedback we’ve received from several fund managers and ETF issuers who’ve been part of our pilot and helped to shape the product and we’re thrilled to now share this with the broader market.”

According to Quantium executive – financial services Wade Matterson, retail wealth management industry data has been “fragmented for too long”.

“We’re delighted to support Iress FundsFlow by combining Quantium’s advanced analytics and AI expertise with Iress’ comprehensive dataset to deliver real-time insights into adviser behaviour and client allocation trends that fund managers need,” Matterson said.