Services
Full Charles River Investment Management System delivery — front-office to middle-office, FIX to custodian. Vendor-neutral guidance from a team that has shipped on both CRD and AIM.
What we deliver
End-to-end Charles River IMS deployments — order management, portfolio management, compliance, and execution management. We scope to your trading workflows, not a generic template. From signed SOW to production go-live in a defined timeline with no scope creep.
FIX 4.2/4.4/5.0 connectivity to brokers, ECNs, and execution algorithms. Order routing configuration, algo parameter mapping, and certification management with your prime broker technology teams. We have established relationships that compress certification timelines.
Position and cash feeds from State Street, BNY, Northern Trust, Pershing, and others. IBOR/ABOR reconciliation architecture. Automated breaks management. If your operations team is manually reconciling positions that CRD should handle, this is the engagement.
Firms that implemented CRD two or three years ago often have workflows that reflect the consultant's convenience more than their own. We audit your current state, identify where automation has been left on the table, and deliver a tuned system — not a report.
Engagement shape
Charles River is a deep platform. A CRD implementation touches order management, portfolio rebalancing, compliance, execution, settlement, and reporting. Firms that go in without a tight implementation plan discover the scope midway through — and pay for it.
We front-load the design work. Every data flow, workflow, and integration point is documented before any configuration begins. What we deliver in discovery is a build specification, not a set of slides.
Full CRD implementations typically run 14–20 weeks. Integration-only engagements are scoped to the specific connection. Optimization projects run 4–8 weeks.
Structured working sessions with trading, portfolio management, operations, and compliance. Output: data flow diagrams, integration inventory, workflow specs, and a build plan signed off before any work begins.
CRD environment setup, workflow configuration, FIX session setup and certification, custodian feed development, and compliance rule implementation. Every deliverable tracked against the signed plan.
Formal user acceptance testing with your front-office and operations teams. Where applicable, parallel operation against your legacy system. Written issue log, resolution tracking, and formal sign-off gating production.
Managed cutover with on-call support through the initial production period. Written runbooks, operations procedures, and a knowledge transfer session your team can actually use.
The vendor-neutral advantage
CRD's portfolio data model differs from most legacy systems. Firms that skip the data mapping exercise discover misaligned position views, attribution errors, and compliance false positives after go-live.
Data mapping is a first-class deliverable, not a line item. We document every field transformation before build starts and test it against your actual portfolio data during UAT.
CRD's compliance engine is implemented at go-live and rarely revisited. As portfolios evolve and mandates change, rule coverage drifts — creating real compliance exposure that looks like a technology problem.
We build compliance rules from your current written mandate, not from the previous implementation. Existing CRD clients get a compliance rule audit as part of any optimization engagement.
Custodian feeds and FIX sessions that "work" at go-live are often fragile — no error handling, no monitoring, no documented recovery procedure. One schema change from the custodian breaks operations for a day.
Every integration we build includes error handling, monitoring hooks, and a written break/recovery procedure. We hand over documentation your operations team can use without calling us.
Whether you are pre-implementation or post-go-live, a 30-minute conversation with someone who has been through it establishes whether and how we can help.