MAIA has been delivering its solution commercially for five years but its technology has been in the making for much longer. MAIA’s blueprint was developed by business, operational and technology practitioners at Fulcrum Asset Management, a leading London-based independent alternative investment manager specialising in macro-driven cross asset investment strategies. Following several successful years of use at Fulcrum, in 2019 MAIA spun out. Today their relationship is no different to any other client as it operates as a fully-autonomous business entity.
MAIA view themselves as a next generation FinTech, offering ‘everything-as-a-service’ with extensive functionality, a genuinely open architecture and compelling pricing to future-proof their client’s businesses. MAIA sees many industry peers struggling to deliver meaningful value to clients as they are challenged by their own outdated technology that in turn reduces RoI, compromises service levels and can foster performance challenges. In other words working around tech debt.
MAIA’s Chief Revenue Officer, Frank Glock, argues: “many of the established vendors in the asset management space are 30-50 years old and encumbered by high costs for both onboarding and ongoing support of their respective clients. Even in the Alternatives space, the largest two players are rapidly approaching quarter-century birthdays and face challenges with interoperability”.
Interoperability and alliances
Clients can seamlessly integrate MAIA with in-house and third-party systems and service providers. “As the central nervous system to the investment process, we have transparent and malleable APIs driving an interoperable architecture to simplify integration. The model not only delivers cross-enterprise functionality in a single platform but brings teams together -interactively – via a communication network designed to optimize productivity, responsiveness and greatly reduced TCO across an investment firm.” says Glock.
MAIA has also formed alliances with other technology firms and service providers including bulge bracket names such as Amazon AWS infrastructure, Bloomberg, and Factset. There are also partnerships withtrading venues and service providers like OMGEO and MarkitWire for market and industry communication, as well as more specialist solutions. “Our strategy is designed around building a ‘community ecosystem’ that is ultimately accretive to our end clients’ business outcomes,” says Glock.
Switching, onboarding and automation
Clients have switched to MAIA due to ever-increasing running costs for software licensing, resource and infrastructure at other providers; limited asset class or market coverage and gaps in interoperability and commoditized support.
When there is a blank canvas, MAIA has onboarded early-stage start-ups in a matter of weeks, and also claims to be faster than competitors at switching over from other vendors.
“The MAIA platform accelerates operational agility through its advanced architecture, automation tooling, cloud framework and data integration and optimization framework,” says Glock. For instance, MAIA boasts that some clients have achieved STP (Straight Through Processing) well above 95%, reducing manual interaction, accelerating transaction processing, and reducing operational costs. This helps MAIA to support ultra-high trade volumes and the firm has one client who processes hundreds of thousands of executions per day.
Client base examples
MAIA’s client base is well diversified by asset class, strategy, geography and size. It serves a broad and very diverse set of firms ranging from relative start-up businesses to established, ‘Billion Dollar Club’ managers converting away from legacy technology. In terms of the asset class and strategy, it can range from simple equity long/short to highly complex derivatives. “In some ways we are still relatively young but are onboarding a new client every 6-8 weeks,” says Glock.
MAIA has a growing client footprint in the Nordic region. A couple of notable firms include a long/short global equity manager and a systematic macro firm.
Stockholm-based global macro firm Truepenny Capital Management, founded by ex Nektar manager, Thomas Orbert, which HedgeNordic covered earlier this year here: Truepenny One Step Closer to Launch – HedgeNordic and Gothenberg-based long/short equity group Protean received HedgeNordic’s “Rookie of the year” award for 2022.
Choosing the right cloud model
“Cloud native” is becoming ubiquitous but it means different things to different firms. Glock argues that: “our cloud native model was a deliberate design mandate from the outset. It gives us faster implementations, shorter upgrade times and optimized support. This improves cost efficiency, operational agility and scalability for our clients”.
MAIA uses a public cloud single tenant model through the Amazon Web Services global infrastructure, which is secure and dedicated to clients. It sits in the same jurisdiction as the client business. “We have avoided a private cloud, multi-tenant infrastructure where data is hosted in a single jurisdiction because firms place huge emphasis on the protection of their data and have certain obligations under GDPR and other legislative directives to ensure data remains private. In a similar vein, other examples of jurisdiction-led data-sensitivity where we are well positioned includes Singapore and Switzerland,” explains Glock.
API-led and multi-language support
Glock explains how, “full programmatic control is delivered by our Client Gateway, which is an API ‘wrapper’ that allows clients to programmatically interact with any data point, event or workflow throughout our platform. It is a bi-directional interface that allows clients to subscribe to datasets and receive updates in real-time. This is a big evolution away from REST APIs that require frequent polling in order to get data”.
A variety of programming languages can be used. The MAIA application is mainly written in Java but the Client Gateway has multiple language implementations including c#, GoLang, Python, Java and an XML interface. Other languages can also be supported upon request.
IBOR improvements
One example of enhanced functionality is that MAIA boasts a dynamic real time IBOR (Investment Book of Record). “This marks an advance on batch processing or ad hoc manual updates that are used to perform calculations across the IBOR providers and have many drawbacks including stale data and slow response times,” explains Glock.
Competitive costs
MAIA believe they are competitive on costs: “We always strive to offer compelling economics from the outset. Our clients evidence tangible savings on running costs, ‘doing more with less’/rationalizing vendor relationships and enabling them to scale through the deployment of our platform. These provide compelling savings in comparison to other vendors in our peer group,” claims Glock.
CONCLUSION
MAIA offers an advanced, future-ready technology platform designed to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enable scalability. Our cloud-native, single-tenant model, supported by Amazon Web Services, prioritizes data security and jurisdiction-specific compliance. MAIA’s competitive pricing, automation, and high Straight-Through Processing (STP) rates help clients cut operational costs and accelerate transaction processing. With extensive interoperability through open APIs, clients experience a responsive ecosystem that drives efficiency across the investment value chain. Serving both start-ups and billion-dollar managers, MAIA’s scalable infrastructure adapts to firms of any size.
This article is featured in HedgeNordic’s “(Em)Powering Hedge Funds” publication.
