5 key takeaways from InvestOps and Sell Side Ops 2025
By James Maxfield, Chief Product Officer.
Hundreds of buy-side and sell-side leaders gathered in Orlando last week for InvestOps and the inaugural Sell Side Ops conference. As you’d expect with so many senior figures in one place, the event was packed full of discussions around the major pain points, trends and opportunities for the industry.
The Duco team was there across both conferences, talking to leaders on the ground and at our round tables, attending expert talks, and appearing on stage in the panel discussions.
Here are five conversation topics you need to know about.
1. The private vs public asset conundrum
The growth of private credit is very real, and for many investment managers this creates a fundamental business challenge for them to address. Lots are now wrestling with having to split operations teams and processes between public and private assets.
This creates challenges around scale, key person dependency and operating model fragmentation. A consistent theme across discussions I had at round tables was the challenges of interrogating the unstructured data that underpins this specific asset class and being able to incorporate it into business workflows and controls.
AI tooling has solved part of this problem for some, but in most cases firms are still heavily reliant on expensive humans to remain in the processing loop. Other private markets – such as real estate – all have similar characteristics, making AUM growth heavily reliant on automation to enable scale and control. As growth continues over time, this will become a bigger and bigger headache for post trade leaders across the buy-side community.
2. From acquisition to broken processes
There’s been a rise in acquisition activities by larger investment managers and insurers searching for scale and new distribution channels. This is partly linked to the growth in private assets.
What this has meant in reality for much of the buy-side investment community is the need to think around integration and harmonisation of operating models. More industry consolidation forces Chief Operating Officers (COOs) to think hard about streamlining and efficiency, bringing scale and resilience as much as cost reduction.
One Chief Risk Officer (CRO) I spoke with talked around the fragmented risk infrastructure they had to navigate across different businesses they had acquired over time, and the challenges of reconciliation and data harmonisation this creates around things such as market, counterparty and liquidity risk. These challenges used to be found mostly within banks and service providers during prior waves of industry consolidation, but they are now increasingly commonplace for the operations management community within the buy-side.
I would expect to see a lot more transformational investment following this acquisition trend to enable sustainable and efficient operations, as it has become a very real problem.
3. The true cost of untrustworthy data
Having listened in on a couple of panel discussions with both the Sell Side Ops and InvestOps communities, the hidden cost of being unable to trust data remains significant. Despite advances in ‘data meshes & fabrics’, AI-powered analytics or data governance, the cost for the industry actually continues to grow.
Much of the middle and back office workload continues to be driven by solving for or fixing poor data. This is exacerbated by the growth of new asset classes and proliferation of data that supports it.
This is a tough nut to crack for an industry which is reliant on data to drive processing, but finds itself under increasing pressure to go faster – T+1, demand for intraday data, increasingly ‘near time’ data being demanded in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – without the corresponding investments in data quality or automation.
There are no silver bullets here, but technology won’t magically solve for bad data in isolation. This disconnect between the industry’s need for speed and the reality of how fast the post-trade engine can go continues to be, in my opinion, the biggest challenge for Operations leaders to solve.
4. Empowering Operations
A common topic across many of the panel discussions was around future-proofing talent pools in Operations roles. With an increasing democratisation of technology, a critical part of Operations leadership roles is now around fostering the right culture of innovation to incentivise and stimulate talent. Building Excel macros will no longer cut it. It was interesting to hear how much focus is now dedicated to this topic – both around building resilient operating models in terms of talent retention, as well as ensuring standardisation and best practice.
The downside of democratisation in this context is the risk of ‘Frankenstein solutions’ evolving to solve for the same business problem. This means that embedding best practice, centre(s) of excellence and the right governance and oversight models become a key part of the automation journey. Many people I spoke to had fallen foul of this – simply buying software and giving it to users – and had misunderstood the importance of embedding the right operating mindset alongside purely deploying automation.
5. Collaboration, not consortium
Both buy and sell-side Operations communities have witnessed firsthand the challenges of industry led ‘consortia’ bringing services to the market to target common use cases on a single platform. There have been some successes here – margin reconciliation and call management, for example. But in the main they have failed due to unwieldy governance models operating them, which have also misread the problem they need to solve for (which is ultimately what customers are buying).
What is increasingly evident now is a trend of buyers encouraging vendors to come together, where the problem is well defined and the solution is spread between their corresponding capabilities. This theme was evident in a couple of panel discussions and also when talking to customers, who seem more open to creating room for this conversation.
Whilst a cliche, this is a good example of vendors acting as true ‘innovation partners’ by bringing best of breed solutions together to solve a customer’s problem – while also not being afraid to ask for commitment or buy-in to the solution they create. This is a positive trend for the industry in my opinion, with solution providers mitigating the risk of throwaway investment on speculative ideas and clients seeing true best of breed solutions coming together maturely across the ecosystem.
Success to me ultimately is providing clients with a level of innovation that they can’t deliver themselves and this type of client-driven collaboration is very additive to this outcome.
New opportunities hampered by old problems
What a lot of these conversations show is that the industry is hampered by old problems as it tries to explore new opportunities. The excitement around private credit is softened by fears around the operational challenges this will bring, particularly concerning unstructured data reconciliation. Firms are also inheriting each other’s legacy architecture through acquisitions, compounding their problems. And at the centre of it all lies the challenge of bad data. But there is hope: firms are looking at uniting an ecosystem of vendors to solve their problems once and for all.
We have conversations on these topics all the time, with some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Get in touch with us if you’re ready to get insight and strategies for tackling the challenges outlined above.