The Ridgeline Reformation

“Ridgeline is different.” It’s a claim every new company makes, right? If you have been in the asset management industry for 10, 20, or 30+ years, we know the technology you are using and we can confidently say that Ridgeline is significantly different from what you’ve experienced.

Ridgeline’s industry cloud SaaS system for investment management is different. Our approach to alliance partnerships and building an ecosystem of technology, implementation and outsourced services partners that help accelerate your firm’s growth is different. Our commercial go-to-market model and customer success plans are different from what you are accustomed to in this industry.

One-of-a-Kind System

Ridgeline is one system. It’s a true single book of record that eliminates guesswork. It allows your entire firm to view consistent, accurate data – from relationship managers engaging with clients to portfolio managers making investment decisions to back office operations ensuring all transactions are reconciled and reported.

Our product supports front-to-back, end-to-end operations including client engagement, portfolio construction, trading, compliance, accounting, and reporting. It covers all front office needs, such as onboarding clients, responding to their requests, and managing their portfolios (including partners/intermediaries, household relationships, and corporate/organizational hierarchies).

Ridgeline provides a complete order management system for domestic and international equities, cash, and – coming soon – fixed income. Real-time or delayed prices are piped in from market data vendors feeding portfolio construction tooling for both model-based and block trade workflows. Ridgeline’s portfolio construction functionality allows the front office team to scale efficiently while allowing customization based on investor mandates. Orders are worked smoothly and fed to electronic trading and post-trade with all the standard connectivity. With a single security master and data set for position management, Ridgeline eliminates the need to import and export data between systems.

Ridgeline’s double entry portfolio accounting system feeds operational and performance reporting on the fly. Farewell batch and scheduled jobs, file exports, transfers, and uploads! The fully-integrated Ridgeline system works together in near real-time. This means a booked accounting transaction – be it a trade, a redemption/contribution, a corporate dividend, and more – is instantaneously included in performance reporting as well as updating intraday cash for portfolio managers and traders. Client statement generation and invoicing are also part of the system.

Developed natively for the cloud, Ridgeline provides customers with seamless, continuous updates and the same version of the product for everyone. Enterprise-grade access controls and entitlements enable firm admins to set up visibility rules and permissions based on various roles within or outside the firm; users only see and can act on customer and firm data if they have the visibility rights.

A New Kind of Vendor Relationship

Ridgeline offers a cooperative commercial experience versus a renewal rigmarole. You can license Ridgeline for as many years as you like with no surprise renewal terms or painful upgrade processes (yes, really!). When we release new features on a regular, frequent cadence, you receive these new enhancements at the same time as all other Ridgeline customers. Imagine new release previews, demos, and communications without the upgrades. These are some of the benefits of a true cloud-native system.  

We also believe in transparent pricing. Ridgeline’s price list is available for all customers and prospects. We price based on a combination of firm asset size, number of employees, and asset classes and strategies. We do not price based on the number of licensed users: everybody at your firm can use Ridgeline. You also will not be penalized for your firm’s success. When your firm delivers exceptional performance returns, fantastic; we do not take a direct economic rent and tax you because you invested your clients’ assets effectively.

Customer Success and Security First

Customer success is one of the cornerstones on which our company was founded. It’s a Ridgeline core value and the heart of our founder’s legacy in the business software industry. 

Ridgeline’s Customer Success Plans are designed to ensure top performance for you, not us. It is modeled after technology service leaders such as Workday (which was also founded by Ridgeline’s CEO Dave Duffield). Our customer success plans offer you choice and flexibility. You can take advantage of our standard plan or subscribe to a premium plan that includes dedicated customer success advocates to help drive user training, new feature adoption, and technical support for your firm. Choose the level and dedicated resources that are best for your firm, and let us close the skill and acceleration gap for adopting new technology and features across your firm. 

We believe part of your success includes our relentless focus on security. Ridgeline has been “security first” since our founding. We maintain SOC 2 Type II certification to provide our customers with confidence and trust in the security and reliability of Ridgeline. Our investments in industry standard multi-tenant data segregation and encryption, thorough evaluation of our technology partners and vendors, and high availability of cloud resources demonstrate that Ridgeline treats your data and your client’s data with the utmost importance.

It’s Your Data, Not Ours

These days “outsourcing” seems to be all the rage. The premise is that you can outsource operating your systems and never hire an operations person again. But do you also have to give up access to your data, or control over your report configuration, or setting up your OMS strategies and CRM configuration?

With Ridgeline, your data is yours. You can access it via our open, documented Ridgeline APIs, configurable reports, and our pre-built integrations anytime you want. 

With Ridgeline as your system of record, you can insource or outsource your daily activities (start of day, reconciliation, trading, onboarding) or both. I wrote about this topic here, “To Outsource or Insource, or Both?”. 

Control over your data, configurations, integrations, and overall administration of Ridgeline can be as granular as you like. We consider it the best of both worlds: outsourcing and insourcing as you see fit. Our ecosystem of certified Ridgeline Alliance Partners can handle your daily activities and operations, or you can manage these functions in house.

In short, Ridgeline is different. We are not your grandfather’s Buick. We are a cloud native, complete front-to-back system with a near real-time book of record. And a lot more than that. But most importantly, we are a true partner deeply committed to the success of our customers. We have our founder Dave Duffield to thank for his customer success values, innovative vision, and investment in building a company that provides an alternative for growth-oriented asset managers.

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