Eagle Investment Systems has set plans for 2016 that include working closely with its parent BNY Mellon to take advantage of the investment bank’s emerging Nexen technology platform. The platform is cloud based and open source, and designed to help BNY Mellon clients become more flexible, client responsive, efficient and fast, in many cases through the provision of data management services rather than software solutions.

Nexen is beginning to be rolled out and uses open application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow all the bank’s investment services solutions, as well as those provided by subsidiaries such as Eagle and selected third parties, to co-exist on a single platform. The platform will also support the bank’s Digital Pulse and Digital Workplace solutions that provide Big Data analytics for fast evidence-based decisions.

BNY Mellon will deploy Eagle’s data management, performance measurement and multiple accounting solutions on the Nexen platform, and share the technology resulting from its digitisation strategy with Eagle. In 2016, by way of example, Eagle will add an analytics layer that uses BNY Mellon’s Digital Pulse technology to its Eagle Access cloud services capability.

Mal Cullen, CEO at Eagle, explains: “Eagle is part of the Nexen programme and can use technology that the bank is developing internally for the benefit of its external clients. Digital Pulse can be used to analyse Big Data. It not only shows the status of operational issues such as how many trades fail and reference data quality, but also gives users a dashboard and transparency into how to improve operational efficiency, perhaps by outsourcing some datasets, and how to scale while sustaining efficiency.”

Eagle is beginning to work with a few of its users on the analytics layer of the Eagle Access cloud and plans to reach production by the second half of 2016. Longer term, Eagle will drive its clients to leverage the Nexen platform, which will provide an ecosystem of hundreds of investment management applications that can be integrated using open APIs to provide complete business solutions.

With Nexen in the making, Eagle is also continuing to develop its applications for deployment on premise and in the Eagle Access cloud, opening the ecosystem up to third-party products and business intelligence tools. Cullen explains: “Our customers’ priorities are to make it easier and faster to consume data from data management systems. To do this, we have invested in a rich set of APIs that are built on top of our meta data layer and tie Eagle solutions to those from other providers. From a data management perspective, we provide a continuum across data management to ensure data is loaded, normalised and can be consumed flexibly and in a way that adds business value.” The company has also made additional cloud management platform investments to make it easier for firms with their own cloud environments to deploy Eagle solutions.

Cullen says towards 100 of Eagle’s nearly 200 clients use its products in the Eagle Access cloud and expects this trend to continue as clients look for data driven problem solving with less reliance on systems and more on services. To support the drive towards data services, Eagle will hire about 100 people during 2016 and invest in its data centres in the US, Poland and India, as well as in an additional centre due to open in Europe early next year.

In terms of growing its business, the company has completed 22 deals in 2015, and expects to close a further six deals in the next month as it comes to the end of its financial year. Next year, it expects half of its new business to come from existing clients and half to come from outside North America. Cullen hopes to add more new customers – “let’s say 25” – and concludes: “Data management is not slowing down. People are still replacing legacy systems and investing in new data management projects.”