How to Fix The Issue of Data Immobility in Portfolio Systems

Why It Matters

Fixing data immobility improves timeliness and accuracy of portfolio reporting, reduces operational risk and cost, and enables firms to scale services and meet regulatory or stakeholder reporting demands more efficiently.

Summary

At the Communify Intelligence Experience, Deep Blue operations director Jeff Harvey framed legacy technology as the primary threat to the investment industry, arguing that disparate portfolio systems and slow-moving dependent vendors create data immobility and force error-prone manual workarounds. He described gaps in aggregation—especially for non-custodial assets like retail deposits—that lead to PDF/email extraction, human data entry, and quality-control bottlenecks. Harvey highlighted emerging AI and robotic process automation tools (citing Communify’s demo) that can securely read client statements, extract data into a maker‑checker workflow, and reduce manual steps. Those solutions promise faster, more accurate portfolio reporting and fewer downstream delays for clients and constituents.

Original Description

Taking time out of his attendance at the Communify Intelligence Experience, Jeff Harvey, Executive Director, Operations, Deep Blue Investment Advisors, spoke with FinextraTV about the key wealth management hindrances. Harvey points to legacy tech advancing more slowly than investor needs, with investors requiring a central point of storage for all of their assets in their portfolio - from fixed, invested and deposited. This holistic overview is a real challenge for existing systems, and Harvey blames a common foe: the immobility of data. Many technological systems, he said, advance at a surface level but are frequently building 'band-aids on top', instead of fixing the core issues. He points to custodians as providing good solutions in line with data aggregators, but suggests AI will help with trickier, bottlenecked data.

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