New FA Version 2.8 is out – fetching real-time prices & improving portfolio management for Front Office

The new FA version 2.8 has rolled out, and it’s time to have a closer look at what’s new. The most important new functionalities include rebalancing with real-time market prices and improved portfolio management to support front office.

This version brings support for rebalancing with real-time market prices. In practice, you can utilize snapshot market data from your data vendor, such as 15 minutes delayed real-time market prices, to get more up-to-date results from rebalancing your portfolios – after all, the more timely your prices are, the more accurate is the prediction of how much to buy or sell.

Regardless of what investment management software your company is using, it should allow you to work with information that is provided real-time. This way, you do not need to waste time looking for the market price information elsewhere. We have come to expect smooth workings from other applications we use to take care of the important aspects of our lives, so how could finance be any different? Finance is about making fast calls, often right now. A great system should support that need.

Specifically, the rebalancing improvement consists of two components:

• New Market Price Connector. FA 2.8 provides you with a new Market Price Connector, allowing you to fetch real-time market prices through your market data provider’s corresponding service. Contact us for more details if you are interested in the connector.
• Rebalancing with 15 minutes delayed real-time prices. If you are already using the new market price connector, you have the possibility to rebalance your portfolios with the latest available prices fetched directly from your market data provider (or if a price is not available, the newest price stored in FA is used). Enable Rebalancing with 15 min delayed prices from Preferences, and every rebalance will use the latest price available to calculate how much to buy and sell.

The Front interface of this FA version 2.8 contains fresh features for basic portfolio management needs, therefore widely extending portfolio managers’ capabilities to manage transactions and accounting material. Now these basic portfolio management features that have long been available for Back Office can be used by Front Office staff likewise.

The features provide portfolio managers the means to create and modify transactions, support for showing accounting information or bookkeeping postings, and running processes against a set of postings in a table. And once the auto-refresh is enabled, just watch your positions update in real time.

This version extends the feature for managing the content of FA Front Office by allowing the maintenance of separate user interfaces for desktop and mobile browsers. Thus making it possible to not only use the mobile version of the application, but to design the actual content in a way that helps you to complete the exact tasks you want to get done (transaction creation or sending messages to customers, for example) on mobile.