Competitive advantage through IT

Information and Technology (IT) have never been more central to our business. Our ability to maximise long-standing investments in technology differentiates us from less established investment managers.

Mike Wright - Technology Director

We build distinctive IT services and platforms across the Group in close collaboration with the business: IT project teams are normally co-located with business colleagues.

We use an 'agile' project methodology which delivers business change value incrementally and frequently, to encourage business ownership and avoid the risks of large scale IT project delay and failure.

Our work is based around a vision for the Group's IT in 3-5 years time, leveraging modern architecture techniques and validated by leading industry experts.

We are constantly investing in the training and personal development of our people. Having hired the very best, we seek to stretch them by giving them bigger challenges and equipping them with the appropriate skills to meet them.

Looking back at the last year, we have made significant strides in improving the business value we obtain from our IT, both in terms of helping make us distinctive to our institutional investors and intermediaries, and by enhancing internal efficiencies.

We have made particular headway in three areas.

01 Making technology a competitive asset for AHL

• Trading efficiency has been enhanced by delivering a wide range of trade execution strategies that maximise our ability to rapidly assume positions with minimal market impact.
• The time it takes to bring a new AHL model to market has been dramatically reduced. Researchers can put small scale exploratory models into trading quickly through a new tactical trading environment, while our full production-scale platform is undergoing a comprehensive review with major components being completely revamped
• New technology is enabling new models; an innovative high-frequency price storage and analysis system is allowing our researchers to leverage existing trading models and create entirely new ones, based on a more granular view of the markets, processing hundreds of millions of prices a day.
• We have extended the global reach of AHL by establishing a trading presence in Hong Kong, maximising our ability to exploit opportunities emerging in Asian markets.