CWAN | Best Technology Provider – Middle Office | Best Risk Management Software Provider | Best Fund Accounting & Reporting Software Provider
Keith Viverito, Managing Director EMEA, at Clearwater Analytics (CWAN) answers the questions on the firm’s wins in the 2025 Institutional Asset Manager Service Provider awards.
The investment management landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. What’s driving this transformation?
We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how institutional investors approach investment operations. European insurers and asset managers have seen an explosion in data complexity. Global solvency requirements, with local nuances, generate massive reporting obligations, while International Accounting Standards have transformed how insurers value investments. The associated regulatory complexity extends beyond compliance. Alternative investments now represent over GBP1.5 trillion on our platform, creating operational challenges that legacy systems simply weren’t designed or expected to support.
What makes this particularly challenging is that regulatory requirements are increasingly becoming competitive differentiators. Firms turning regulatory data into actionable insights are pulling ahead of those still treating compliance as a necessary evil. The size of private credit market has grown to about USD2.5 trillion globally, adding another layer of operational complexity with bespoke structures and reporting requirements.
How are firms responding to these pressures?
We’re observing a market divide emerging. Forward-looking institutions are moving from fragmented systems onto unified platforms that handle everything from trade capture, exposure and risk monitoring, performance attribution, to regulatory reporting. Others remain challenged and restricted by legacy system complexity.
The most significant development is generative AI, moving from “AI experimentation” to “AI transformation.” Our clients use Clearwater’s high-impact agents to help answer specific, high-value questions, accelerating tasks that once took hours into minutes of work. That’s the operational transformation the market is recognising.
CWAN recently won three IAM awards. What do these wins signify?
These wins reflect our view that operational excellence has become the foundation of competitive advantage. The middle office is no longer just trade processing. It’s about creating a real-time, unified view of your entire portfolio – combining accurate positions, exposures, and analytics in one platform for public, private and securitised investments.
All three award wins represent the core of investment operations. Our clients achieve remarkable efficiency gains: up to 90 per cent reductions in manual reconciliation and up to 80% faster regulatory reporting. These results demonstrate why there’s growing demand for platforms that automate accounting and reporting across the entire investment lifecycle, powering faster closes, cleaner data, and confident compliance.
Where is the industry heading?
In our view, the industry is moving toward “operational intelligence,” where investment operations deliver meaningful competitive advantages rather than acting as a cost centre. Successful firms are learning to transform operational data into portfolio insights, risk intelligence, and client value.
Technology consolidation will accelerate because maintaining multiple, specialist solutions is economically unsustainable as regulatory complexity increases. At the same time, client expectations are evolving rapidly: they demand same-day reporting, instant reconciliation, and immediate exposure visibility. Some European insurers are dedicating entire teams to meet regulatory reporting requirements, which presents significant resource challenges.
The firms capturing market share understand this dynamic. They view operational infrastructure as a strategic asset and are discovering that superior operations don’t just reduce costs. They enable better investment decisions, faster client service, and more sophisticated risk management.
We believe the future favours institutions that recognise operational excellence as a key pillar for growth, turning operational efficiency into competitive advantage, regulatory burden into strategic insight, and technology investment into measurable client value.
