Buyer's guides
One for each category. What we have verified, how the field splits and where each entry came from, and the questions worth pressing on.
Across every category
- How to run a vendor search for a first-timer
- The question set, annotated full questions, with weights
- The market, counted figures from the catalogue
By category
Each category guide covers the same ground: what the systems in that category actually do, how the field divides between the broad platforms and the specialists, which products we have verified, and the questions that separate them when you put those questions to a vendor. The guides are our own editorial work and say so; the product facts inside them carry the source we read and the date we checked it. A guide exists for every category that has at least one verified product in it, so the list below grows as the catalogue does. None of them ranks the products, because a ranking of systems bought for different reasons by firms of different sizes would be a fiction dressed as advice. Read the guide for the category you think you need, then the one it warns you it is confused with.
- Alternative data 54
- Capital calls and waterfalls 44
- Capital introduction 32
- Client reporting 81
- Cloud and managed IT 17
- Collateral and margin 40
- Combined OMS/PMS platforms 53
- Corporate actions 35
- Data management 101
- Deal flow and CRM 42
- ESG data 35
- Execution management 58
- FIX connectivity 33
- Fee billing 35
- Fund accounting and NAV 82
- Fund administrators 67
- Fund formation and launch 46
- Illiquid valuation 23
- Index and benchmark 39
- Investor portals and CRM 72
- LP portals 67
- Legal counsel 27
- Managed services 83
- Market data 89
- Order management 58
- PE and VC fund administration 66
- Performance and attribution 46
- Portfolio accounting 61
- Portfolio monitoring 102
- Pre-trade compliance 41
- Pricing and valuation 47
- Prime brokers and custody 57
- Reconciliation 60
- Reference data 63
- Regulatory compliance 24
- Regulatory reporting 65
- Research management 66
- Risk analytics 84
- Surveillance and archiving 32
- Trade settlement 47
- Transaction cost analysis 37
- Treasury and cash 40