A $55B asset manager faced three high-stakes platform decisions at once: a central trading platform, a security master, and a data catalog, with no consistent way to evaluate them against a common standard. The client had access to the full set of market options; what they needed was a consistent way to evaluate those options across three simultaneous, high-stakes platform decisions without letting opinion, politics, or uneven information shape the outcome.
A recurring pattern in financial services is that decisions are made without involving the practitioners who will operate the systems. This leads to recommendations that are difficult to defend and implementations that stall. We designed and ran the selection process with technology and operations stakeholders engaged from the outset.
The engagement delivered $4.6M in negotiated savings across the three selections, three defensible platform recommendations, and a vendor assessment framework the firm now owns and can apply to future decisions.
The three platforms in play touched different parts of the firm’s operating model, but they needed all three in place to support a planned modernization of its front-to-back operating model.
Each decision carried significant operational impact on its own, and together they compounded. A misstep on the trading platform would affect every desk. A mismatch on the security master would create downstream data integrity issues. A weak data catalog selection would leave operational teams without the governance infrastructure they needed. The firm wasn’t short on vendor knowledge; what they needed was an objective process that could be applied consistently across all three selections and would stand up to stakeholder scrutiny when the recommendations were delivered.
Our Data & AI team members ran three parallel vendor assessments using a dual-workstream model: Technical and Functional Evaluation on one track, Commercial Review on the other. The Commercial Review track built side-by-side total-cost-of-ownership models, benchmarked pricing against comparable engagements, and developed the negotiation strategy that ultimately delivered the $4.6M in savings. The two tracks ran simultaneously so that commercial terms did not influence technical scoring and technical preferences did not shape commercial negotiation.
Before any vendor was scored, we mapped requirements to the people who would use each platform day to day. Vendor assessments often falter when technology specifications are written by project teams without the practitioners who understand where the operational gaps are. To address this, we engaged portfolio managers, trading desk staff, compliance, IT, and operations directly, capturing their distinct needs as scorable specifications rather than general preferences so that evaluation could be applied consistently across reviewers.
For the trading platform alone, this involved engaging 26 SME groups and scoring three vendors across 35 critical features and 176 functional specifications, assessed against three decision lenses: Functional Fit, Delivery Readiness, and Commercial Value. Every score was documented and every recommendation was traceable back to criteria the organization had defined before evaluation began.
We then applied the same framework to the data catalog and security master selections, calibrating it to each platform's distinct requirements while preserving the underlying structure and rigor.
The $4.6M in negotiated savings came primarily from the trading platform and security master selections, with the data catalog selection contributing additional commercial improvements. Across all three engagements, leadership walked away with recommendations they could defend at any level of the organization, grounded in documented criteria rather than vendor pitch materials or internal advocacy.
Following selection, we immediately got started on implementing the chosen platforms. That transition moved faster than is typical because the practitioners configuring the systems had been part of the evaluation process and understood the reasoning behind each decision: which components were critical, where the edge cases sat, and what had been ruled out. The assessment framework remains in place at the firm and can be applied to future platform decisions without rebuilding it from the ground up.
North Highland partners with financial services firms on high-stakes platform and vendor selection decisions. Interested to learn how we can help your organization build a defensible, repeatable assessment process? Let’s talk.