Business Intelligence for Investment Management: Performance, Risk, and Client Reporting

An asset manager's BI team builds performance dashboards. The portfolio managers review them and find that the holdings don't quite match what they see in the OMS, the performance numbers don't reconcile to the official accounting book of record, and the attribution analysis uses different sector classifications than the IBOR. Each difference is small. Together they make the dashboards a parallel reality that PMs don't trust for decisions and the CFO can't use for client communication. Within months, the data team is rebuilding from a different source and the dashboards everyone agreed on become the dashboards no one uses.

Investment BI done right starts with IBOR/ABOR reconciliation as the non-negotiable foundation. The semantic layer sources from the official book of record after every pricing cycle. Holdings, transactions, and performance match the accounting system exactly. Attribution uses the official sector classifications, currency conventions, and benchmark definitions. Risk metrics align with the official risk system. With this reconciliation, the dashboards become the trusted view across the front, middle, and back office. Without it, every team builds their own version and the firm operates on multiple inconsistent realities.