The systems investment operations actually run on

Late reporting, reconciliations that break, and a new asset class that takes a quarter to onboard are usually one problem wearing three faces. I find which one it is, build the fix, and leave the controls that prove it holds. One person, thirty years, front office to back.

Write the rule down before you need it.

Former COO. Every operational process outside the investment decision, at a $650 million fixed income relative value fund.

Former Head of Middle Office. Investment operations leadership inside a $23 billion life and annuity company.

Enterprise investment data. Selected, scoped, implemented and ran enterprise data management for a $25 billion general account and an $18 billion derivatives portfolio.

Your operation has reached its ceiling when

• Adding an asset class, an instrument type or a data source takes real engineering effort every time.
• Reporting depends on a spreadsheet two people understand and nobody will replace.
• Nobody can trace a number in a management report back to where it came from.
• A process that matters has exactly one person who knows how it works.
• Growth is adding headcount faster than it is adding automation.
• Auditors, clients or regulators ask questions faster than the operation can answer them.

Most firms treat these as six problems and fix them one at a time. They are usually one problem, and what it costs to keep carrying it almost never gets priced.

What I build

Enterprise data foundations. Firm-wide data warehouses, portfolio returns databases and P&L attribution engines, so investment data is available across the firm instead of living in parallel spreadsheets and manual extracts.

Systems integration across public and private books. End-to-end vendor implementations across trading, risk, liability servicing and treasury, with bespoke servicing workflows for private credit and commercial mortgages.

Operational automation. Manual, Excel-driven workflows replaced by systems and reporting that run in seconds instead of days, with an audit trail behind them.

The governance work that goes with all of it, and the writing and models behind each claim, are on Practice.

Don't take any of that on faith

Several working models are published on this site. Not screenshots, not demos. Excel files you can download, open and check: live formulas, no macros, no protected sheets, nothing computed somewhere else and pasted in as a value. Each one is versioned, carries a changelog, and names the defects found while building it.

Cost of Current State Worksheet. What the environment you already have costs to run, across four cost lines, priced on your own book. Six tabs, 266 live formulas, and on most of its sensitivity grid it tells you not to do the project.

Forward vs Backward Price Adjustment. The same history under both adjustment conventions, built side by side from the same raw data. Sixty five years of one security, 16,286 daily rows and 266 corporate actions, 197,642 live formulas, and the point where one convention stops working.

Fixed vs Float Swap Model. The swap most life insurers actually trade, fixed against a forward-looking Term SOFR leg, bilateral and uncleared. Twelve tabs, 5,188 live formulas, every output checked cell by cell against an independent implementation.

The others are on Tools.

Why one person

Most people who can build this have never written a derivative use plan. Most people who write derivative use plans have never built anything. Thirty years across the front, middle and back office means the system and the document come from the same desk, and the system is the thing that proves the document was followed.

It also means the person you hire is the person doing the work. No partner sells the engagement and hands it to a team you have not met. I scope the problem, design the solution, and build the deliverable. Where the work genuinely needs another specialist, I say so before it starts rather than halfway through.

If you have a middle office running on spreadsheets you no longer trust, or a derivatives book and a regulator asking questions, that is the conversation to have.