“Find those who believe what you believe.” This is what Geoffrey Moore, acclaimed author of Crossing the Chasm, recommended to our company back in January 2021 at Ridgeline’s annual kickoff meeting

Geoff was with us that day to help set the tone for the year ahead. His advice makes a whole lot of sense when you’re attempting to disrupt a market. So we took it very seriously.

For Ridgeline, “those who believe what [we] believe” means customers who share our vision for the investment management industry and teammates who share our passion to build something revolutionary together. People who share the same business values. Collaborators who work together for the greater good. Partners who understand the give-and-take of pursuing radical change.

Did we deliver on Geoff’s challenge? Yes!

Was it easy? This answer is complicated, just like the rest of 2021.

Launching Ridgeline

Let’s start with our customers.

We are eternally grateful to the innovators and early adopters who share our vision for modernization and are committed to helping Ridgeline make it a reality. In 2021, we added 10 firms to our customer community, now 16 strong. These asset management firms range from $1B to $100B AUM, operating in a variety of asset classes and currencies, with predominantly institutionally-focused long-only strategies.

How did we find these partners in a pandemic? To one, we mailed a giant pinecone that caught their attention. Others we targeted based on a specific set of market criteria. Still, others came to us through word of mouth and personal connections. A few were able to visit our headquarters in Tahoe and meet our teams in person. But for the most part, we had to earn their support and trust over Zoom.

As our first design partners, these customers spent hundreds of hours with us in 2021, sharing their challenges and needs, testing, and guiding our product roadmap. We launched an alpha testing program designed to give our customers direct access to the Ridgeline platform as soon as certain features and capabilities were ready. Four firms participated in our first round of alpha testing, collectively spending more than 100 hours providing hands-on-keyboard feedback.

Our most pivotal customer achievement this past year was deploying Ridgeline at a $1B AUM asset manager. The firm’s investment and operations teams have been accounting, reporting, generating trades, and managing compliance with Ridgeline (in parallel with their legacy systems) for a few months now, and in early 2022, they will cut over to using Ridgeline exclusively. Additionally, we began loading data and preparing for parallel operations at two additional asset managers slated to go live in 2022. After less than three years in development, Ridgeline’s industry cloud platform is ready for deployment!

Aside from the obvious pandemic-related speed bumps, our most persistent challenge is this: our customers want Ridgeline today. But we are committed to taking the long view and building a technology company that can scale with the industry for decades. We cannot be everything to everyone just yet, and our customers know patience is essential to our collective success. We remain more committed than ever to marrying investment management business challenges with modern, innovative technology solutions.

The Hard Stuff

“Start with the hard stuff.”

This is what Ridgeline CEO Dave Duffield told us in the beginning. He was specifically talking about making investments that prepare a company and its technology to handle enormous scale and mission critical workloads. The reality is that many software companies underinvest in these areas in pursuit of releasing the next feature. Conversely, Ridgeline is taking an integrated platform approach and preparing to serve this industry for decades. A few related areas that picked up momentum for us this past year:

• Workflow Engine — Across all functional application areas, we’ve implemented system-wide alerting, notifications, task management, and job scheduling. Most of our customers use Microsoft Outlook as their primary system to alert their peers of status and to get jobs done.
• Global Search — We hear time and time again that customers loathe searching through menus and sub menus. We’ve implemented global search across our entire system so users can query any data in the system and search for functionality such as running an appraisal report.
• One End Point — We now publish over 900+ APIs and offer them fully documented to our customers. We think of APIs as binding contracts with our customers (and test them accordingly) as they use them to extend our system into their existing IT footprint.
• Continuous Delivery — The number one request we get from investment managers is to get them off the upgrade treadmill. Most firms go through a long, arduous process to upgrade their legacy systems every few years. We invested significantly in our ability to continuously innovate and deliver our SaaS product as rapidly as possible. We are proud to have released Ridgeline 47 times in 2021 — nearly every week. Our customers uptake these releases with no service disruption or downtime.
• Security-First Mindset — This emphasis guides all decisions regarding the data, operations, and property of our company, products, and services. We continue to operate Ridgeline according to the high standards outlined in our SOC II certification that we achieved in 2020. We move fast, but never at the expense of security and privacy.

People First

As you can probably guess, 2021’s Great Resignation created the most hyper-competitive talent market we’ve seen in decades. The resulting impact spurred creative thinking at Ridgeline as we launched new programs to engage our workforce, attract talent, and recognize the amazing individuals who work at Ridgeline. By the numbers, we exited 2021 with 285 employees, adding close to 100 new teammates to our company. We are proud to continue hand picking the brightest minds in industry, cloud software development, and security to work with our customers.

As for back-to-the-office protocols, we remain guarded but are looking forward to the day we can safely collaborate and celebrate as a whole team. At present, our people work where they are most comfortable. If individuals need or want to use one of our offices, we test for COVID upon entry. We firmly believe in the power of human connection and in the innovation that results from being physically together, and we know our customers do too.

Despite having a somewhat distributed workforce, we continue to put our people first and creatively invest in an award-winning and engaging employee experience. This past year, both Glassdoor and Inc. Magazine recognized Ridgeline as a Best Place to Work.

Opportunity on the Horizon

Every day Ridgeline is closer to becoming the system of record for our current customers, and ultimately, many other leading asset managers. While we are humbled by the audacity of this vision, we are also more bullish than ever about the opportunity to deliver it to a receptive market.

Before Ridgeline, firms required multiple on-premise systems linked together with batch-based relational databases and a lot of Microsoft Excel — legacy technology that is difficult to upgrade and not secure. On the flip side, we’re working with our customers to prove that critical accounting and trading functionality can be integrated into one cloud offering, greatly simplifying a firm’s operations and unlocking data to be refined into rich insights — delivered as a highly reliable, available, and secure service powered by our partner — Amazon Web Services.

As we begin a new year, we are so proud to have seen our team and our customer community rise to the occasion of building and operating a next-generation investment management solution. This mission isn’t for the faint of heart, nor is there an easy button for building a company like Ridgeline. But as our CEO Dave says “If it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.”

If you believe what we believe, and if our mission motivates you as it does us, join us in the pursuit of ambitious innovation, in working together to update critical business systems, in serving an earnest and supportive customer community, and in enjoying the journey along the way. Please check out our updated website to learn more about our products, company, and values.

Welcome to 2022. Let’s do this!

Ridgeline In Review: “Find Those Who Believe What You Believe” was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s it like to be a Ridgeline intern? Who better to tell us than the interns themselves. Thanks to Rebekah Westerlind, Rob Scott, Matt Cuento, Urvashi Mahto, Will Fuchs, and Jimmy Lee for their participation! (Lightly edited for clarity.)

What drew you to want to spend your summer with Ridgeline?

Matt: The startup culture and ability to contribute massive amounts in the early history of a company! Not to mention a beautiful location to do so in!

What did you like best about your experience here?

Rob: The effort that everyone made to make these 10 weeks a jam-packed experience. Whether that was events that HR put on, full-timers bringing us to play basketball and Pickleball, or just go to the beach. Everyone was invested in our experience.

Jimmy: The amount of support I received from the people on my team as well as the whole company was astounding. Everybody at Ridgeline was ready to dive into any problem I faced, and it made me feel like I really had a family here. Moreover, I credit a lot of the personal growth I’ve had this summer to my direct team and manager; everyone was patient, understanding, and gave me the right pieces of advice and feedback to really mature, think about how I can be the best me, and continue doing awesome things!

What was the hardest part of your internship?

Urvashi: The hardest part of the internship was building the habit of taking initiative. My team had the privilege of shaping our project as we saw fit, but we had to do the research and start the conversations that would help us visualize the end product. I had all the support I needed, but I had to at least initiate the conversation to ask for it.

Matt: The start! My project, the stats warehouse (aka “the pantry”), was so open-ended as to what it could be and limitless in scope. This was the opposite of our experiences in school! Being a part of the decision-making process in the main-use cases and architecture was scary but a huge learning experience that I loved.

What was the most surprising part of your internship?

Will: I was a little surprised at how much creative control we are given over our projects.

Rebekah: The most surprising part of the internship was how integrated we were with the full-time team and the real work that was going on for the product. We were pulled into projects with tight deadlines that were vital for customers, helped set up infrastructure the entire team would use, and were treated like real, useful, contributing members of the company.

What’s one thing you learned this summer that you feel confident you’ll use in the future?

Urvashi: I feel confident that I’ll expose myself to unique opportunities and experiences. This summer, I was able to experience so much inside and outside of the office. Career-wise, I got the opportunity to learn about so much new technology, coding practices, and professionalism. Outside the office, I had so many firsts (jet skiing, cliff jumping, etc!). This summer has taught me that more experiences = more knowledge and a richer life.

Jimmy: I was never really an outdoorsy person before coming to Ridgeline … but I’ve been dragging my friends out to walk and get coffee or hike much more frequently now. Technically, I think I’ve gained a lot more conviction over my work. I’m confident in what I build, especially after taking ownership of two product features this summer with my team, and I’m ready to go up to bat for the fruits of my labor. I didn’t really feel all that confident about my code before, and I think I’ll carry this skill with me throughout my career.

What was it like living in Ridgeline’s Lake Tahoe headquarters?

Rob: In the best way possible, it felt like summer camp. We were in a beautiful place with a bunch of fast friends enjoying everything we did both inside and outside of work.

What impact did the pandemic have on your internship experience?

Rebekah: We were able to be in the office most of the summer, which was really valuable. Because of the pandemic, there is a flexible work-from-home policy, and people are comfortable collaborating over Zoom which made people in all of Ridgeline’s offices accessible.

Describe Ridgeline’s culture in four words!

Rob: Bring your whole self!

If you could pack any one thing from the Ridgeline office in your suitcase as a keepsake, what would it be?

Will: Probably Lillian the puppy. [Editor note: Ridgeline’s offices are all dog-friendly!]

What do you think you’ll be doing in 10 years?

Urvashi: Having a 10-year reunion with my intern class :’)

Jimmy: I don’t even know what I’ll do for dinner today!

A Look Back: Ridgeline’s Summer 2021 Intern Class was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Q. What do a 500-year-old math textbook and sophisticated software for modern asset managers have in common?

A. They both rely on a seminal business concept that’s been unchanged in over five centuries: Double Entry Bookkeeping (DEB).

DEB is a method of recording and reporting on business activities that was first described in 1494 by Italian mathematician and “Father of Accounting” Luca Pacioli. Centuries later, the idea is still used basically as it was first conceived by Pacioli. Under DEB, every financial transaction has an equal and opposite effect; that is, a debit in one account offsets a credit in another. A “journal entry” is created from a business transaction; within each journal entry, a set of balancing journals that describe outcomes from the transaction (e.g., wrote down inventory, received cash, recorded a gain/loss) are posted to a financial ledger. Financial ledgers are in turn rolled up into income statements, balance sheets, and other views that allow businesses to assess financial health.

Why has DEB had such remarkable staying power, and how does it apply to the investment accounting world? It’s a fundamental business premise that can be explained through a clean, intuitive model. In building the industry cloud platform for investment management, Ridgeline recognizes the importance of having a powerful, intuitive model driving one of our customers’ most critical business functions: investment accounting. While the model still conforms to Luca’s time-tested approach, it has been extended to apply to the market’s modern-day investment accounting challenges.

However, on any given day for an asset management firm, there may be hundreds or thousands of accounts and millions of transactions to accurately record, process, and understand. This sheer volume of data makes for a lot of complexity — and a lot of room for errors to sneak into a system.

To address the complexities inherent in building a next-generation investment accounting engine, Ridgeline has two high-level goals: 1) apply the proven, age-old DEB model to a software architecture at scale, and 2) enhance the architecture by extending the use of DEB to tackle the complexities specific to the asset management industry in a better way.

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION ABOUT INVESTMENT ACCOUNTING

Before jumping into a key example of what makes investment accounting so challenging for today’s investment managers, let’s quickly distinguish it from its calculating cousin: traditional or “corporate” accounting.

Put simply, traditional accounting systems record outcomes. Typically, they serve as repositories of business transactions resulting from various manufacturing processes that drive quality and efficiency (i.e., revenues, costs of production, R&D, inventory). Unlike traditional accounting systems, investment accounting is not just for recording. As asset managers know, these systems are interwoven into the day-to-day operations of a firm — to the extent that an investment accounting system itself is the primary manufacturing process for an investment firm.

Consider a manufacturer that uses various complex systems to manufacture widgets. While these systems (cost accounting, inventory and parts management, etc.) may communicate with the corporate accounting system, the systems’ functions play a bigger role in driving profitability and controlling costs than does the corporate accounting itself. In investment management, on the other hand, the end product being “manufactured” is accounting views, not widgets. This means investment accounting is not just for record keeping but is a critical business driver in and of itself. The following diagram illustrates this critical difference.

CONTRASTING ACCOUNTING SYSTEMS FUNCTIONS

In the diagram above, someone may wonder why investment returns would be considered a “variable” determinant rather than part of the manufacturing process. Investment returns can be influenced by the quality and timeliness of information received, but ultimately human interaction — rather than systematic factors — drives the “production” of investment returns. And these returns can vary greatly.

Given its manufacturing-like role, investment accounting systems can contribute significantly to reducing a business’s overall costs through an efficient use of resources and increasing the quality of information disseminated by various audiences. Those gains tend to remain permanent once the system is in place.

But, unsurprisingly, anything that can drive that much business value can’t be an easy fix. Sure enough, investment accounting is a challenging function to implement and automate. This is typically due to the volume of data, the imperative for accuracy, and the problems that arise when inaccuracies inevitably seep in during the rapid pace of business. The concept of “temporality” helps to illustrate the magnitude of the problem to be solved as well as the huge benefit for the asset management community in having a next-generation software platform that addresses it and other key challenges.

Temporality

Temporality in accounting involves the ability to process and report information based on various time dimensions, primarily “as of” and “as on” views of accounting data. The ability to provide these dimensional views in an automated setting is dependent on the ability to tackle four major software challenges as described below.

“As On,” “As Of,” and Error Correction

Back in Luca’s day, accounting was primarily focused on recording entries as they were received (“as on”). If prior errors were discovered that had a “dependency chain” (i.e., subsequent accounting entries were impacted by the fix), adjusting entries were figured — perhaps with the help of the 15th-century calculator known as an abacus — and then posted as “correcting entries” today instead of when the original activity and its downstream consequences should have been recorded. If one wanted to review what a general ledger should have looked like based on the day the error should have been fixed, barring a superhuman effort from a scribe with an endless supply of quills, this information was lost! The ability to review ledgers based on when entries should have been recorded is commonly called “as of” views.

Closed Period

In Luca’s world, an exchange of data was performed on foot, horse, or mule. If a period was undergoing a “closing process,” that period’s books would remain open for a certain time interval so that late entries coming from afar could be recorded (after all, mules need their rest too). Keeping periods open is something that still exists today, except in a digital world, it is delivered in a more timely manner.

Temporality in the Asset Management World

The asset management market requires a myriad of temporal views and processes that have historically stressed investment accounting systems. The operational effort, cost, and risk associated with having to manually intervene to produce many of these views is significant; as one moves up market to larger and more complex asset management firms, the challenges grow from significant to staggering.

It is easy to understand the magnitude of the challenge with an example. Let’s assume that a EUR-denominated bond purchase was made in a USD base currency fund/portfolio two weeks ago. Two days ago, it was discovered the trade carried a yield from which to derive price from that was incorrect, and a cancel/rebook was performed on the trade. Then one day ago, the trader realized that yet again, the yield quoted on the corrected ticket was wrong, so it was cancelled and rebooked with yet another new yield. What was the impact from these activities?

These seemingly simple trade corrections spawned multiple temporal views that an asset management firm must have visibility into. These views can be logically broken down into two primary categories, each with specific types:

1. External

• Client
• Regulatory
• Other (e.g. performance measurement to pension fund consultants)

2. Internal

• Managerial
• Operational
• Fund accounting-specific

The illustration below depicts the activities triggered by multiple corrections of the same past event.

IMPACT FROM A SINGLE TRADE WITH TWO CORRECTIONS

The cascading effect of these competing “corrections” quickly becomes a multi-pronged headache for firms, including the following challenges:

1. Error corrections — Each trade correction triggered a series of adjusting entries. In this simple example, dozens of journal adjustments resulted.
2. Many temporal views are now required.

• Managerial — “Show me the history based on ‘today’s knowledge” (e.g. show trade adjustment #2, positions, balances, and all activities on the dates they should have been posted as if the trade had been booked correctly to begin with).
• Client — “You sent me an appraisal two days ago and one day ago. Show me why my appraisal changed.” In this case you need to start with the balances as they appeared “as on” two days ago, then trade adjustment #1 and its corresponding activities/adjustments, followed by closing balances as they appeared “as on” one day ago.
• Performance Consultant — Same as Client, just pick two “as on” dates and the activities between the two dates.
• Fund Accounting — “Show me balances from yesterday’s NAV close (“as on” yesterday), today’s corresponding activities/adjustments, followed by real-time (“today’s knowledge”) balances.
• Many, many more…

From the Model to the Real World

In the real world, this situation is many orders of magnitude greater than the example above, as asset management firms have hundreds or thousands of funds and portfolios, each of which holds hundreds or thousands of investment tax lots. The example doesn’t include complex corporate actions (e.g., reorganizations), wide securities coverage, additional sets of books (e.g., tax), jurisdictions, multi-basis, multi-currency, and a host of other challenges that make building investment accounting systems the ultimate challenge for the market. Whew.

Financial institutions of all shapes and sizes are profoundly impacted by software issues related to temporality. Significantly increased operating costs result from the headcount increases that are necessary to deliver many of these views via Excel or other less productive means. Costs to reconcile can include hiring hundreds or thousands of employees. Equally as important are the operating and regulatory risks that come with a fragmented temporal environment.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Ridgeline is both humbled and excited about the challenges we face as we transition investment accounting from its over-burdened current state into a single, integrated, industry-specific solution that includes other critical functions like trading, portfolio management, compliance, reporting, and client engagement. Our 250+ person team of engineers, technologists, and industry experts spends each day taking on these big hurdles to deliver the investment management industry a better alternative to what legacy technology has offered.

If you’d like to know more about how Ridgeline is helping to give asset management firms a competitive advantage with a purpose-built, cloud-native platform, please drop us a line at hello@ridgelineapps.com.

The 500-Year-Old Idea Behind Ridgeline’s Modern Investment Accounting Software was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In today’s investment management industry, it seems “to outsource or not to outsource?” is an all-or-nothing question: either fully outsource your firm’s tech to a solutions provider that can manage it for you or fully insource to maintain complete control over your systems and your data.

With advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, how do you choose?

We have talked with hundreds of asset managers since starting Ridgeline in 2017, many of whom either currently outsource or are considering it for key parts of their operations. No matter a firm’s priorities and requirements, Ridgeline believes the right answer is “you can do both.” A newly-possible combination of outsourcing and insourcing lets you have the best of both worlds — modern, industry cloud software-as-a-service with third-party, value-added services expertise.

OUTSOURCING PROS AND CONS

Outsourcing your tech can make financial and operational sense, especially if you run a lean and efficient firm. It makes even more sense if you are still using 20- or 30-year-old legacy technologies that require regular upgrades, significant maintenance, and customization. You are in the business of generating alpha for your clients; managing long upgrade cycles, worrying about cyber security, and prepping for disaster recovery is likely not your core competence.

Plus, few firms like the idea of hiring full-time operational and technical support personnel only to confront headcount reductions when the economy takes a sustained downturn.

Therefore it’s understandable that outsourcing value-added services has become more prevalent across both the back and middle office for everything from portfolio accounting and performance reporting to trading operations and client-facing reports. The strategy can be cost effective and allows small or mid-size asset management firms to compete with larger firms.

But what do you sacrifice when you fully outsource your middle- and back-office operational investment systems?

1. Control and access to your fine-grain client and trading data. With your systems fully outsourced, a third-party has control over your accounting, performance, and trading data. Your relationship managers, portfolio managers, and traders need immediate and comprehensive access to their data to do their jobs successfully and drive better performance for your clients. If your data is difficult and possibly restricted to access via a third-party services provider, your team cannot react quickly, analyze and generate insights, obtain revenue intelligence, or even conduct on the fly investment performance analytics. In speaking with asset management firms, we repeatedly hear that fully outsourcing can make operations very happy while impeding the ability of your front office personnel to drive better performance for your clients.
2. Timely responsiveness to your clients for their requests. When clients request specific performance data and custom reports, being reliant on your outsourced services partner to respond to the request in a timely and accurate manner can be a recipe for frustrated clients. Time is money when servicing your most demanding and profitable clients, and often it can take days or longer to get what you need from your outsourced services partner.
3. System integration quagmire. Your outsourcer likely has their own preferred accounting, trading, or performance reporting tech that they host, license, and offer as a service to your firm. You may not even have the credentials to log in directly to these outsourced systems, or you might have dated portal access. You may also have your own client relationship management, portfolio construction, compliance, and/or trading systems that you manage in the front and middle office. The result is frequently a mishmash of client, portfolio, and security identifiers between systems that often need to be reconciled via scripts to support daily and weekly file-based batch updates between these systems. The use of third-party market pricing data that needs to find its way into many of your disparate systems may complicate this mishmash. Is this solvable? Yes, but it requires the same technical and operations support you hoped to avoid hiring internally.

So, if there are significant pros and cons to fully outsourcing versus fully insourcing your mid- and back-office and technology, what should an asset management firm do?

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Ridgeline is developing the industry cloud platform for investment management and serving as a partner for asset management firms’ digital transformation. We deliver a single platform for client engagement, portfolio management, trading, compliance, double-entry accounting, and reporting with a single data orchestration engine. Ridgeline is a fully-integrated software as a service built on an enterprise-grade platform natively in the AWS cloud.

With Ridgeline’s industry cloud platform, your firm maintains agility and flexibility to outsource or insource value-added services around the platform — so you experience the advantages of both strategies without their drawbacks. You can utilize a state-of-the-art, front-, mid-, and back-office system while contracting with your third-party outsourced value-added services provider for your start- and end-of-day operational activities as well as customized performance reporting. Through it all, you maintain control of your systems and data without having to manage technology upgrades, software maintenance, and systems integration.

With Ridgeline there are no upgrades — ever. The system is continuously updated every week for all users (akin to Netflix). Release notes with feature improvements are published to the Ridgeline Knowledge Base along with user job aids and an API portal to access Ridgeline’s 600+ APIs. Our APIs include related documentation for ease of integration and access to your data. Updates, maintenance, system disaster recovery, high availability, and SOC 2 Type II security is 100% maintained by Ridgeline’s 200-person (and growing) cloud engineering team.

What does this look like in real life?

• Your portfolio managers, traders, and operations team as well as your third-party value-added service provider(s) can all securely log in to Ridgeline via multi-factor authentication to equally access your accounting, trading, and reporting data. No more arguing about who has a license.
• Your value-added service provider can conduct exception-based reconciliation, post-trade settlement, and start-of-day processing while also initiating corporate actions, interest and dividend posting, and more in Ridgeline.
• When your most valuable clients call with a critical information or trading need, not only does your team have the tools to respond quickly but they see the same data and source of truth. Ridgeline’s composite management and performance reporting tools enable you and your outsourced services provider(s) to configure reports via pivot tables with export to XLS and PDF so that everyone is able to respond to client requests in a timely and efficient manner.
• Best of all, you own and control your client, trading, and reporting data. Whether you build your own data mart or work with ours, or you apply your own analytics and insights or leverage ours, your team and your third-party services providers have the flexibility to meet your clients’ current and future needs.

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU

The industry cloud boom includes a growing list of success stories that solve their industry’s problems in a new way: Veeva for life sciences, Guidewire for insurance, and Vlocity (now Salesforce Industries) for telecommunications. And now Ridgeline is bringing industry cloud benefits to investment management, combining best-of-breed, fully-integrated SaaS with the outsourced value-added services partners you trust to conduct your day-to-day operational activities. This effectively does away with what had been an all-or-nothing outsourcing proposition. This approach can satisfy your most critical internal stakeholders in portfolio management, trading, and client engagement as well as your operations and accounting teams that want to outsource back office functions.

If you are an institutional or high-net worth investment management firm or an outsourced value-added services providers who wants to learn more about applying this best-of-both-worlds vision to your business, contact us at hello@ridgelineapps.com.

Outsource or Insource? Asset Managers Can Have the Best of Both was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the heels of Ridgeline being recognized as a 2021 Best Workplace by Inc. Magazine, we sat down with Silvia Johnson, Ridgeline CHRO, to talk about building a best-in-class workforce and workplace.

We are so excited to have been named an Inc. Best Workplace! As a company founded just a few years ago, this recognition is particularly rewarding. Were you surprised by this win? Why or why not?

I should not be surprised, but I was! It’s humbling to be part of a company that has garnered best place to work accolades — during a pandemic, while tripling in size! But ultimately the recognition is a testament to the people we’ve hired and the enthusiasm and resilience they’ve brought to the organization.

Prior to Ridgeline, you led HR at big-name companies in the tech world. What have you brought to Ridgeline from other parts of your career?

Ultimately I believe it’s patience and calm. I’ve seen a million and one ways to solve problems, so most things don’t phase me. Understanding needs and finding solutions while fending off drama and spin comes pretty naturally to me at this point in my career. :)

Compared to the other, more established companies you’ve worked for, how is Ridgeline different or unique?

Aside from our headquarters being on the shores of Lake Tahoe? I do think we are unique in that we trend younger and more diverse than your typical startup. This presents a great opportunity for us to leverage new ways of doing work, as those earlier in their careers usually perceive fewer constraints. In addition, we have a great blend between industry experts and technology leaders. This combination can cause friction in a good way by helping us better deliver for the industry and solve problems for the asset management community in new and unique ways.

Culture is something every company talks about but is sometimes hard to define and cultivate — especially during a working-from-home period where everyone was behind screens. How would you describe Ridgeline’s culture?

Fun — really. Every time we survey our employees about our culture, “fun” always comes up in feedback. Of course we are guided by all our core values, but it makes it that much easier to come to work when we can laugh and have fun together. Even in the middle of a pandemic we found lots of fun ways to connect.

What has Ridgeline done to sustain a strong culture in face of the challenges of the past year?

We did two things. First we established a culture that is employee led. From day one, we ask all employees to take responsibility for owning the culture and values to ensure persistence beyond the leadership team. In addition, during the pandemic we were intentional about incorporating virtual connection points into our work days.

In the early days of the pandemic, teams planned socially-distanced picnics here in Lake Tahoe — masked up, six feet apart, while enjoying each other and the outdoors. In NYC, our team got together in Madison Square Park to (safely) build an epic snowman. We’ve also had virtual pie-baking contests, shipped surprises to employees around the country, and spent Earth Day competing with virtual teams by earning points for environmentally-conscious activities, such as picking up litter in neighborhoods, skipping meat, or taking short (or no!) showers. Oh, and we pride ourselves on a very strong emoji game in Slack!

Being called the “best” at something right out of the gate could make for complacency. What are Ridgeline’s long-term plans for remaining a place that employers and customers love to be associated with year after year?

I wish we could be complacent some days! However, we have no room for that. Over time, we may make decisions to refocus or rebalance resources, but at the end of every day, our number one priority is solving for our employees. As our CEO and Founder Dave Duffield says, “When you care about your people, they have fun, they do rewarding work, they serve customers, and customers help sell products. It’s all an ecosystem, and it all starts with the employee.”

What is the most satisfying part about working at Ridgeline?

I could pull from any number of examples to describe the type of company we are building, but the most poignant stories for me are the personal anecdotes. More than once I’ve been told by a new employee, “I’m happy to be at Ridgeline because it’s the first time I feel I can bring my whole self to work.” That is by far the biggest compliment from my viewpoint. Though we are working hard and building for a demanding space, it’s easier because employees don’t have to compromise who they are when coming to work.

Sound like somewhere you want to work? Ridgeline is growing fast and hiring for a number of exciting opportunities! Check out the roles here.

CHRO Silvia Johnson on Ridgeline’s “Best Workplace” Secret Sauce was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ridgeline has spoken to hundreds of asset managers over the past few years about the efficiencies and inefficiencies of how they run their businesses — conversations that have been critical for building a product that puts real-world business needs and customer satisfaction above all else. Among the interesting findings is the love-hate relationship with everyone’s favorite data workhorse, Excel. What countless conversations revealed is that while a life without Excel seems impossible to imagine, asset managers recognize that running their highly-specialized business with a data tool not explicitly built for that purpose is less than ideal.

For instance, say you need to see performance by security and sector. In Excel, you would download the raw data, create a pivot table, and analyze to try to understand what is driving performance. But what if that functionality was already built into the software you’re using for everything else in your day? You wouldn’t have to take other steps — or even leave the window you’re in — to see what’s impacting performance.

Even among the loyalists who have spent years learning how to become what essentially amounts to Excel programmers, there’s a sneaking suspicion that there must be a better way.

Spreadsheet Gymnastics

Ever come across spreadsheets that take so long to open you can grab a cup of coffee while you wait?

Spreadsheets embedded with so many lookups and formulas that sourcing an error in a cell becomes a day-long exercise?

Documents whose original owner left the firm long ago and everyone else just crosses their fingers that it will keep working?

If you’re nodding, then you, friend, have been performing spreadsheet gymnastics. Subjecting Excel to convoluted twists and turns with a higher degree of difficulty than it was designed for. Creating a labyrinth of connected documents more complicated than the original problem they set out to solve. Emailing static files with an inability to compare changes across versions or understand the evolution of data within the document. Yet despite these known limitations, Excel remains king for many in the finance world who need to contain, manage, and manipulate a lot of information.

From client onboarding to trade execution to accounting and performance, data drives all facets of investment management. So while the historical reliance on Excel is understandable, it masks a bigger issue. It’s the data within the software — not the software itself — that holds the power to drive performance, differentiation, and profitability. So what if you had a data tool that was built precisely for the ways a modern asset manager needed to use it?

Ridgeline’s Data Difference

Every part of Ridgeline’s enterprise platform takes a fresh approach, including data. That’s because Ridgeline had the unique opportunity to start from scratch. Not being beholden to decades-old legacy systems that have been patched and repackaged as “modern” has proven liberating — and beneficial for creating the right solution for the fluid problem set facing today’s asset managers.

Most other systems are burdened by siloed architecture and require batched processes, integrations, and emailing spreadsheets to transfer and manage data across teams. The user pays the price in wasted time, inefficient processing, and lack of clarity around what the “truth” is.

By contrast, Ridgeline technology includes a single book of record, which allows for seamless communication and a unified source of data across the front-, middle- and back-office. An accurate, firm-wide book of record eliminates the need for separate accounting, investment and performance books of record. Not only can you be certain that your data is accurate and clean, Ridgeline lets you easily sort, filter, and group information more intuitively to arrive at answers quickly.

Unifying all data for everyone at the firm to easily access, understand, and draw insights allows investment managers to unlock the power of their information in a whole new way.

The Investment Management Industry Finally Gets the Tech It Deserves

Ridgeline is confident enough to understand that if we’re doing our job right, users basically don’t notice us. Because using an interactive, intuitive tool built for a specialized task removes frustrating inefficiencies and allows you to stay focused and productive while the technology fades into the background where it belongs.

Here are a few specific ways running your business on purpose-built software benefits you (and then you can go back to not noticing us):

• Spotlight the answers — Our API-first approach means anyone on the Ridgeline platform can access data directly instead of having to use Excel as a mediator across functions. With near-real-time, accurate data in a modern user interface and built-in global search, answers are easy to find. Having one-click access to all the data within Ridgeline — everything from audit trails to data-rich reports — means you can streamline workflows and accelerate the analytics that fuel decision making.
• Say “no thanks” to thankless tasks — A single source of data provides consistency in information and reporting across the platform. Gone are thankless tasks such as manually reconciling ‘ABC Company, Inc.’ and ‘ABC Company Inc’ in two separate reports generated from two different systems. Instead of trying to make sense of spreadsheet tables of different security identifiers used by different vendors, you can focus on more value-add tasks (AKA just about anything).
• Make clients happier — Ridgeline understands the importance of client onboarding and management for building trust with investors. That’s why we’ve built our client management function to be fully integrated, removing the need for separate project management spreadsheets and countless internal email follow ups. A 360-degree view of client data and accelerated workflows brings your investor’s needs to the forefront and allows you the bandwidth to give them the requisite attention.
• Save the aspirin, no more upgrade headaches — Ridgeline is a cloud-native platform. There are a lot of perks inherent to that for our customers, but one that we hear sighs of relief around is that upgrades happen seamlessly instead of via painful system upgrade interruptions. Continuous deployment from the cloud removes the cost and operational overhead of software updates and lets you take advantage of new features as soon as they’re released.

In short, the right tool will get you out of your spreadsheet labyrinth to unleash the power — and value — hiding in those cells, columns, and rows. (And yes, you can still export into Excel!)

Data is just the beginning. If your firm wants to know how Ridgeline offers a competitive advantage in the evolving investment management industry, please say hi at hello@ridgelineapps.com.

Ridgeline Wants to Help You Love Your Data Again was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ridgeline’s Sweet Tech Stack (and Other Reasons We Love DevOps)

We know that innovative engineers may be too busy solving problems and implementing new technologies to read this. TLDR: Ridgeline DevOps is a) the best (according to LinkedIn and Glassdoor, anyway), b) hiring, and c) excited to meet you — and your dog.

At Ridgeline, our DevOps team is inventing the tools and processes to disrupt a $112 billion industry. Yes, billion. With a B. It’s no small feat, but we’re up for the challenge — and plan to have a lot of fun while we’re at it. We’re building a cloud-native fintech platform based on a serverless microservices architecture that continuously evolves. Not surprisingly, our talented engineering team is also expanding. But with a lot of companies out there, how do you know that Ridgeline might be the place for you, awesome DevOps person? We understand that being the right fit is more than a technical skill set, so we’ve put together a cheat sheet as well as some insights from our team to help you figure out if Ridgeline has the career you’ve been looking for.

Inside the Mind of A Ridgeline DevOps Teammate

• You come across a system bug and get excited because solving challenges is your thing.
• The idea of zero downtime and true continuous deployment in a serverless environment makes your heart go ping.
• You find yourself hiking along a mountain trail, daydreaming of ways to improve DevOps.
• You deal with bumps in the road with the same enthusiasm you take on a black diamond mogul run.
• You think about how cool it would be to work for a company in Tahoe, 1.5 miles from a ski lift, with a Powder Rule that encourages employees to hit the slopes before starting your day in our dog-friendly office.

Intrigued? Read on to learn more about what makes the DevOps team at Ridgeline so special. (Or skip to the end for the scoop on our tech stack if you’re THAT engineer.)

A Typical Day (April Fools! There’s no such thing.)

According to DevOps Manager Chris Petrunik, “At Ridgeline, the beauty of DevOps is that days are rarely the same.” Of course, some elements remain constant, such as monitoring systems and troubleshooting incidents. Ian Evans, who recently celebrated his one-year anniversary, appreciates the opportunity for problem solving: “Time spent triaging and debugging production issues is a surprisingly fun process at Ridgeline, given the incredible team spirit and collaboration here.”

Fun truly is a core value at Ridgeline. For example, a recent Technology Show & Tell started off with several April Fool’s presentations, including a deadpan proposal to stage Ridgeline transaction processing in outer space for improved capacity and performance. That same sense of purposeful fun is brought to time spent collaborating on designs and brainstorming solutions. Part of this spirit is due to our commitment to hiring a diverse team: a mix of tech and industry backgrounds, newly-minted college grads collaborating with seasoned senior engineers, and everything in between. The mix results in a wonderfully unique culture and a group of passionate people who really love what they do.

Most days everyone gets some heads-down time to document designs or write code. Senior members of the team mentor individuals and host regular stand-ups to give everyone a chance to quickly check in and stay connected. Maria Olivero joined Ridgeline 18 months ago with a few decades of experience under her belt. As the leader of our Disaster Recovery and Incident Response program, her days are fast-paced, exciting, and fulfilling: “I’m helping people and learning, and really, that’s all I need to be happy.”

Overall, a day in DevOps comes with continuously-evolving conversations that bring opportunity for personal growth, while supporting other teams and the overall DevOps mission to improve the speed and quality of development and deployment.

A Company That Shares Our Vision

Ridgeline’s leadership is dedicated to ensuring that all teams embrace and prioritize DevOps’ mission because they know this will dramatically increase Ridgeline’s capability to deliver market-leading products. Our DevOps Liaison program is one of the ways we unite engineers across functional areas of the organization for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Liaisons help inform teams about new tools, processes, or issues to keep everyone creating at peak efficiency and avoiding blockers. Liaisons also facilitate communication between teams, ensuring that (1) engineers understand the business need behind every line of code, and (2) non-developers know how you get from writing a line of code through putting it into production.

The result of this well-defined process and infrastructure that systematizes cloud development and constant fine-tuning? More stability in our architecture, a shorter and more automated development lifecycle, and opportunities for engineers to switch teams without needing to learn new standards.

This collaborative mindset means DevOps can gather customer input, release changes, and react based on feedback in a matter of weeks.

What We’re Working On Now

DevOps prioritizes perfecting our pipeline process. These two current initiatives support this objective:

• Continuous Delivery — The Infrastructure Engineering squad recently kicked off designing continuous deployment of our infrastructure as code (IAC) layers, the Terraform-based services that provide AWS infrastructure to support our microservices. They will be the first team to move from weekly to continuous deployment, which will be a game-changer for our customers, who are accustomed to the notoriously disruptive and costly upgrades of legacy fintech. DevOps at Ridgeline is proud to be on the forefront of changing that perception. “Customers get a more stable experience when they are constantly having code delivered to them,” explains Nathan Yocum, who joined Ridgeline two years ago. “The faster we can get changes into customer hands, the faster we can respond to feedback and provide the best possible product.”
• Environment Manager tool — We created this tool to coordinate deployment of all our microservices and infrastructure layers to AWS. It is at the heart of how releases at Ridgeline happen. Initially it took specially-trained people several hours to build out a new instance of the application. Now anyone can build out a new instance in under an hour with a single command. This allows for a rapid feedback cycle and lets teams focus on their core logic rather than navigating infrastructure.

As Nathan explains, “We spend a lot of time improving developer tooling so that everyone can experience the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process. We are constantly refining and automating portions of the software development lifecycle.” Developers across the company know they can jump in to support another team because they are using the exact same infrastructure.

These “behind the scenes” pipeline efforts are essential to Ridgeline’s success, enabling us to develop, debug, and deliver higher-quality code to customers faster.

What’s Next?

DevOps is always at the forefront of innovation at Ridgeline. Recent goals include Continuous Delivery, Zero Downtime (ZDT), Blue/Green Deployment, and Chaos Engineering.

Ridgeline Tech Stack

CI process: AWS CodeBuild
CD process: CodePipeline
Infrastructure: Terraform, Cloudformation
Services infrastructure: CodeBuild, StepFunctions, and CodePipeline
Persistence layer: built with DynamoDB and RDS
Pipelines and Dev tools: written in CDK using TypeScript
Languages: Python (Pycharm), golang, TypeScript
TypescriptServices: deployed as AWS Lambda functions
Libraries: FastAPI, Pydantic, and an in-house deployment library
Other important tools: Insomnia, AWS Serverless Tech, AWS Console, AWS CLI, SAM, Codepipeline, Codebuild, Jupyter, Node JS, Git, and Github.
Connecting: Zoom, Slack, and Google Hangouts
Documentation: GSuite, Confluence, Zendesk, and Google Drive

Other Cool Stuff

Offices: Incline Village, Nevada (HQ); Reno, Nevada; and New York City
LinkedIn Top 50 Startups 2020
Glassdoor Best Places to Work 2021
#1 Best Place to Work in Northern Nevada 2020
AWS SaaS Factory Partner

Ridgeline’s Sweet Tech Stack (and Other Reasons We Love DevOps) was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ridgeline set out with a bold goal: to deliver sophisticated enterprise software with consumer-grade usability that solves the complex needs of the investment management industry. To keep that promise, our team of 225 engineers, technologists, and domain experts has to constantly answer an evolving set of ever-more challenging questions.

Many of these questions center around data. Ridgeline’s platform is built on a single source of truth: one, unified set of near real-time data across all the applications in the platform. We know how critical it is for our customers that data is accurate and accessible. So, how do we design for a user who needs to access mountains of data streaming in from a variety of sources for hours on end? Assuming we can accomplish that, how do we empower users to act on that data in a variety of ways that all have different dependencies? And how do we do it in a way that is cohesive, understandable, and scalable?

The core tenet that guides our solution to these questions is a focus on data density. While most people would interpret density to be cramming as many tables, cells, inputs, and metrics into one page as possible, we believe that data density is really about facilitating access to precisely the right information at the right time.

Yes, having everything on one page makes it viewable, but does it really make it useful? If everything on the screen looks important, then nothing looks important. In product design we call this noise: irrelevant information that can distract the user from what their main task is.

To decrease noise and increase usability, product designers at Ridgeline go behind the walls of data to think about the business needs driving the need for information.

For instance, which information is necessary to complete a certain task — placing a trade order requires fundamentally different data than creating a new portfolio strategy. Which information isn’t necessary? What’s the bare minimum requirement? What would the “above-and-beyond” version be?

As we answer these questions, we’re able to form actionable insights.

• Our users need to consume, digest, and then act on constant streams of unstructured data.
• They need the right data at the right times.
• They value, above all else, efficiency.

As Ridgeline designers, we implement three major principles to support these insights.

1. Optimized workflows

One crucial limitation with many existing investment software systems is fragmentation.

Users must pull data from three or four different applications to accomplish a single objective because each application is a separate system. The result leaves the user constantly ‘alt-tabbing’ between apps; a usability nightmare that slows down business and fatigues the user.

Ridgeline believes users should be able to accomplish their daily goals in one dedicated workspace. One that is optimized for major objectives and does not hinder access to secondary and tertiary tasks.

To design an optimized workspace like this, Ridgeline places an emphasis on learning true user behavior. Our first six customers collaborate with us and provide feedback on our products as part of our Design Partner Program. We’ve also hired a deep bench of industry and domain experts who are knowledgeable about the investment manager experience. This combination allows us to truly understand our users’ workflows and to design purposefully for them.

For example, a portfolio manager might be reviewing a portfolio and realize that they need to create an order to gain exposure to a certain equity. They shouldn’t need to abandon the current page and navigate a cluttered desktop to achieve this. With Ridgeline, the task, creating the order, can be accomplished without leaving the page of the primary objective, auditing the portfolio.

To accomplish this, we are building quick order functionality that can be accessed without navigating away from the current page. This user-centered approach caters to popular workflows while still allowing quick access to other actions, which enhances efficiency.

2. Layered information

Balancing the need for necessary information against the importance of a clean, goal-oriented interface is always top of mind for the design team.

To help find this balance, one solution we will soon employ is the concept of layered information.

Often, an asset manager will look at a large batch of information — it could include portfolios, orders, reports, or clients — and then select certain types of information to explore in depth.

We recognize that certain data is critical to scan the page and make the decision to dive deeper. Once that decision has been made, different data is required to make the next decision, whether that be diving still deeper, acting, or simply returning to the previous page.

The key is providing the right data at the right time. Too little data at any given step and the asset manager wastes time searching for the necessary information before making a decision. Too much data at any given step can distract and fatigue the asset manager, resulting in inefficiencies.

Layered information lets the user control the amount of data needed. Layer 1 is an overview that allows the user to quickly scan and determine what needs immediate attention (individual portfolios, orders, etc.). Layer 2 provides more depth on each individual piece and offers the ability to act on that information. In many areas, Layers 3, 4 and 5 are necessary.

Of course, these layers need to be obvious and accessible to the user, which leads to our third guiding principle: cohesive design.

3. Cohesive design

Powerful tools take time to master. Whether it’s a car, a table saw, or software, there is a learning curve before a tool becomes effective. Once people take the time to master a complex tool, the benefits of its use surpass those of a more simple counterpart.

Investment managers (and, all of us, really) don’t have the time to fumble through complex software. They need to serve their clients. At the same time, complex software makes it easier to achieve the same goal: serving their clients.

Cohesive design is the key to solving this catch-22. This principle shortens the learning curve, allowing a beginner to find information quickly in a complex system without decreasing an expert’s ability to leverage the same system for more complicated needs. We’ve talked about what we’ve done to implement data density for experts; we also make it work for new adopters.

Cohesive design creates an interface that is predictable and trustworthy. We foster predictability and trust by creating visual and interaction patterns. In design, patterns are repeatable steps or visual indicators that a user can learn and rely on throughout the app.

The following are some examples of cohesive design in Ridgeline:

• Colors have thoughtful, industry-defined meanings that users already know (blue means buy, red means sell) or can learn quickly. Users are able to scan pages and understand the meanings of colors without stopping to second-guess themselves.

• Buttons explicitly state their function so that there aren’t surprises after clicking. Users know when an action will further their primary objective or take them to a secondary objective.
• Aggregate pages are consistent across the application. Whether the subject is a portfolio, a trade order, a client, or a report, users will understand how to navigate the page.

Data density guides Ridgeline’s approach to designing a complex, usable platform. Cohesive design ensures that it can be learned by everyone.

One key differentiator of the Ridgeline platform is how it pulls different data sources into a cohesive unit. The Ridgeline Design Team optimizes this breakthrough by presenting that data in a way that is accessible, digestible and actionable. The resulting experience allows users to put information to work quicker than ever, so they can stay focused on driving value for their firm and their clients.

Data density: the right information at the right time was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ridgeline University Recruiting: Rising Above the Crowd

Ridgeline staff writers asked Bria Elly, our University Relations recruiter, to explain how she goes about finding and validating a “good fit” at Ridgeline. Read below for tips on how to show your best self in a Ridgeline application and interview.

Q: Let’s talk resumes for a minute. If you were given 25 resumes to review, and you HAD to give a job offer to at least one of them — without an interview — what would you look at to select your winning candidate?

First, I would take a step back and look at the resume as a whole. Is there a lot of blank space? Resumes communicate experience, so blank space doesn’t work in a candidate’s favor. Second, I’d look at qualifications. Do they meet the minimum bar of the job description — major, relevant experience, previous internships or roles? Third, I’d dig in. I actually read descriptions of the experiences and projects that candidates list. Is the experience relevant to the role? Does their resume accurately depict completion of key objectives during their time at a company or on a project?

Q: Another scenario: If you were put in a room with 25 people, and you HAD to pick one to interview for a job at Ridgeline, how would you go about selecting that person?

This is a great question because I go through this every year during career fairs and on-campus events. We meet with about 100 or so students at any given career fair, and we narrow down all those students to about 10–20 to move forward with an interview. First, we make sure they meet the minimum requirements of the job. The next decision falls on the conversation. We look for a lot of soft skills such as communication, humility, or perseverance, to assess cultural fit. Is this person interrupting me? Can this person speak to their experiences clearly? Does this person seem interested in Ridgeline?

Q: Say your sister-in-law applied for a job at Ridgeline. How would you tell her to prepare for an interview?

I’d honestly tell her to be herself and to come with good questions. We gauge a lot of the “interest” factor on whether the candidate’s questions are unique to him or her.

I’d also tell her to talk about her experience in its truest form rather than trying to say things she’d think a recruiter would want to hear. In other words, tell us what you think and feel.

Additionally, say her personality is different than that of other team members. That’s a good thing at Ridgeline. We strive to be a diverse employer, and we look for people who have different perspectives and backgrounds.

Q: You manage Ridgeline’s University Recruiting program. How can students interested in Ridgeline rise above the crowd?

Come to our events! We host a lot of on-campus events at a handful of core target schools. The people I meet at them stand out because they’ve taken time out of their day to meet us — rather than just submitting an application and nothing else.

Q: How can you tell if a candidate is a good listener?

This character trait can come out in a couple different ways. I think the most basic answer is that they don’t interrupt. Surprisingly, it’s quite common for a candidate to cut me off while I’m asking a question or finishing a thought. Again, we view the interview process as a two-way street, and we can quickly tell if a candidate is someone we think would work well in our team-first environment with just a 15-minute conversation.

Q: What does a typical interview cycle look like at Ridgeline?

First, we do a recruiter screen. Second, a manager or director usually completes another behavioral screen. For engineering candidates, our third stage is a technical screen with two members of the engineering org.

The next stage is an onsite interview. In pre-COVID times, candidates visited our HQ in Lake Tahoe and spent time getting to know the people, exploring the town, and seeing our office. This step is important because it creates a two-way street between us and the candidate to help gauge mutual interest and commitment.

Next, we have candidates speak to one of our leaders in the area they’re interviewing for. Lastly, we either make an offer or let the candidate know we are not moving forward at this time. Our interview process can be quite lengthy, but we’re thorough. The people we bring on are as committed to us as we are to them.

Q: When a candidate asks you what is unique about Ridgeline, what do you tell them?

Let me paint a picture: Imagine you’re 20 years old at a career fair walking around to all the employers on your list. You have some extra time at the end and you see a banner with the phrase “Work in Tech, Live in Tahoe” on it. Intriguing, right? So you see what it’s all about. You end up liking the folks at the booth, you interview, and then you get an offer. Now you’re comparing more established San Francisco Bay Area companies and this startup in Incline Village, Nevada. Those Bay Area companies probably have all the perks — the never ending food, the big company outings, onsite gyms. Why would you ever choose Ridgeline?

But then you see the bigger picture: You’re 20 years old at a startup in Tahoe with a little over 200 employees and growing rapidly. You see the workings of a village where everyone works together toward common goals. Your work has a direct impact on the product. After your first year, the company will likely be at 400 employees; the year after that, probably 600. And you imagine being at the start of a company that is in its prime, and you can say you were one of the first.

I can guarantee there won’t be a dull moment, and I can guarantee that as we grow, you’ll grow too.

Q: Have you ever been in an interview where, when it ended, you said to yourself, “What the heck just happened?” Do tell.

Sadly, yes. The call started with a candidate thinking Ridgeline was a construction contracting company. To be fair, I’m sure there’s a company with our name that does that. But this clearly showed me that they didn’t do their research. It went further downhill with questions that could have been answered on our website. It became more of an informational call at that point and left a bad taste in my mouth. So do your research before hopping on a call with us!

Ridgeline University Recruiting: Rising Above the Crowd was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Ridgeline team has spoken with hundreds of investment management firms over the past few years to discuss their business needs and challenges. While no two firms are the same, we heard a consistent theme: maintaining and integrating multiple systems is a costly endeavor and, worse, impacts a firm’s ability to serve its customers. Siloed applications are a historical artifact — a reflection of available technology at the time they were built. However, software and infrastructure have progressed significantly in the past decade, and now is the time to tackle the integration problem. Let’s get into the details.

Consider the industry concept of a “book of record.” Recently, fintech vendors have touted their ability to maintain an IBOR (investment book of record), which complements their ABOR (accounting book of record). PBORs (performance books of record) are also emerging from performance vendors. Typically ABORs, IBORs, and PBORs are maintained in separate systems, and each needs to be integrated to accurately calculate and maintain a book of record.

This raises a question: Can investment management firms afford to maintain separate books of record for each system? Frequently these systems are sourced from different vendors, but even when they’re from the same provider, they often operate on separate databases, architectures, and user interfaces. How does a firm know systems are properly in sync? Do integrations break whenever one system requires an upgrade? How is a firm expected to reconcile information between systems?

Consider an IBOR maintained within an order management system (OMS). Typically an OMS will refresh its positions in the morning using data from the accounting system. Is an IBOR a valid book of record if its positions are imported from another system? And yet, despite this complication, firms cannot reconcile positions with custodians without importing accounting data into their IBOR.

What’s more, throughout the day the OMS maintains an account of pending, executed, and allocated trades that have occurred on its platform. However, the OMS does not have knowledge of intraday transactions occurring in other systems. It may attempt to import these transactions (or the affected positions) during the day. Hopefully the separate systems process the transaction in the same manner and the import occurs without disruption. But how does your IBOR know for sure the intraday information processed correctly? By definition, a book of record must verify its information. Is the OMS doing this?

Investment managers are looking for a single source of data — a platform — that spans the front and back office. Many vendors tell a platform story. However, those platforms are built on various 90s-era technologies, loosely integrated behind the scenes.

The Ridgeline platform was built around the premise that a single, firmwide book of record is a fundamental requirement for any modern investment management platform. At the core of our platform is a double-entry journal accounting system. Positions, trades, and cash activity are reconciled daily with the custodian. Performance attribution is calculated using the same data journalized by the accounting system. Intraday, the impact of any transaction is broadcast to the rest of the platform. (We built an events-based microservices architecture to achieve this.) Each part of our system determines whether to process a change or ignore it. In addition, every module on the platform broadcasts internal updates. The key point is that every transaction is processed once, with the resulting change available to those functions that need it.

Again, let’s get specific. Consider a simple spin-off transaction: Company ABC spins off Company XYZ. The transactions show up in the start-of-day positions, but most order management systems receive the previous day’s close positions. The portfolio managers (PMs) decide they want to sell XYZ at market open. Early that day, the operations team processes the spin off in the accounting module. A firm using multiple legacy systems now needs to get those new positions from the accounting system into the OMS. Do they import the positions from accounting to the OMS again, further delaying the PMs? Or do they attempt to process the corporate action in the OMS, hoping the resulting positions match those in the portfolio accounting system?

In either case, the firm risks not entering correct trades in time for market open. With Ridgeline, once the corporate action is processed by the ops team, the resulting positions are available throughout the system. Individual modules will determine whether to process them. The trading module, for example, will want to reflect the positions immediately to prevent holding up the PM. The performance module will wait until the end of the day before incorporating these positions. The result? No duplicate transactions, and no need to move data from one system to another.

A corporate action is just one type of transaction that might affect an IBOR during the day. Consider cash contributions and withdrawals, previous-day trade cancel/corrects, or any number of custodian-reconciliation break resolutions as well. Each impacts the firmwide book of record and should be incorporated into an IBOR. But does a firm really want to integrate with the accounting system for every one of these transactions, every time they happen? Are you truly a book of record if you do not?

ABOR, IBOR, PBOR, and whatever other new books of record require maintaining and syncing systems across a firm. This is an expensive endeavor! An accurate, firmwide book of record is a massive differentiator, but solving the integration problem once and for all requires starting from scratch. At Ridgeline, we’re doing just that — building a unified platform, using the latest technologies, on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Imagine what your team could accomplish if they weren’t fighting with integrations all day.

If moving to modern technology, streamlining workflows, and optimizing processes on a cloud-native platform energizes your firm, we have room for a few more design partners in 2021. If you’d like to see Ridgeline for yourself, please get in touch.

A Single Book Of Record was originally published in Ridgeline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.