Over the past few years, we have engaged closely with discretionary fund managers (DFMs), platforms, and technology firms to identify areas where standardised processes could create significant value for the industry. After in-depth discussions and collaborative efforts, it became clear that three specific areas were in urgent need of standardisation: MI reporting for DFMs, model editing, and rebalancing.  

Financial services operate in a complex ecosystem where multiple stakeholders—from fund managers to platforms and technology providers—must work together seamlessly. Without a unified approach, processes become fragmented, leading to inefficiencies, errors, and lack of transparency. Different systems often struggle to integrate with each other, and inconsistencies in reporting or model management can slow down operations, adding risk and eroding trust between firms. In fact, even platforms that operate on the same underlying tech, have their own processes for editing, rebalancing, and reporting.  

In response, platforms have faced increasing demands from DFMs, requiring them to accommodate the onboarding of diverse model structures and address growing MI reporting requests. In addition, NextWealth data showed that assets in discretionary MPS grew 28% in the year to March 2024, highlighting the rapid expansion of MPS in the market and the critical need to standardise for scalability.  

DFM commenting on the recent NextWealth whitepaper (Keeping MPS Clients in Focus): 

There are some platforms that we have onboarded in the past that we wouldn't touch today, if we were onboarding MPS on these platforms. And as a result of this, we're now doing a full due diligence process, and one of the key criteria is the operational efficiency of the platform. And then we're very specific as well about the MI that we get.

Our goal was to reduce these pain points by developing industry-wide Standards that could streamline collaboration between DFMs, platforms, and technology providers. Through this collaborative initiative, our MPS Standards ensure that these processes are efficient and provide DFMs with consistent MI data sets.    

We have now published version 1.0 of the MPS MI Reporting Standard, which is available as CSV templates and as OpenAPI/JSON message Standards. 

If you would like to find out more about these Standards, then please contact [email protected].