Strengthening Your CBOR: A Unified Client View for the Whole Business

The need for a clearer, more connected view of clients is not new. For over a decade, asset managers have sought to consolidate disparate data sources into a single, actionable perspective—but progress has been slow, incomplete, and often ineffective. The challenge remains: firms struggle to quickly and confidently assess client exposure when market events occur, and senior leadership lacks an accurate, consolidated view of clients across asset classes and business lines.

A unified client view is, in effect, a Client Book of Record (CBOR). However, rather than sitting within investment operations, this benefits from top-level sponsorship so that teams such as Finance, Sales, and Distribution can participate. Due to this placement, it benefits from the necessary data rigour applied by both operational and business users, ensuring a more complete and reliable understanding of client activity. This is not about creating another new data set but rather unifying existing views—investment, accounting, transfer agent (TA), and CRM data—into a single, structured model. 

While CBORs are gaining traction, the reality is that many asset managers still operate without one, relying instead on fragmented systems and manual processes to piece together client insights. For those that have implemented a CBOR, the next step is extending it to support a truly unified client view. Asset managers who take this approach will be best positioned to enhance client relationships, strengthen distribution strategies, and drive profitability. As fee pressure intensifies, the ability to extract strategic value from client data will become a key differentiator.

Market Events and the Challenge of Client Visibility

When financial crises, corporate scandals, or geopolitical conflicts unfold, asset managers must act swiftly to assess client exposure. Yet, Sales and Distribution teams often struggle to assemble a complete and timely picture of the impact. Clear and proactive communication is critical in these moments—not only to reassure clients but also to provide actionable insights on portfolio impact, potential risks, and next steps. Data can be pulled from multiple sources: investment desks, finance, and transfer agents, but takes longer and is not as trustworthy as it would be if it came from a system that had a unified view of clients mapped to all sources of AUM, products, and investment desks.

The same challenge applies to leadership oversight. Senior decision-makers, from CFOs to Heads of Sales and Distribution, need confidence in reports detailing client activity. Even when reports are produced regularly, their completeness and accuracy are often questioned. A structured, cross-functional CBOR for client data would resolve these gaps, ensuring leadership has the visibility required for strategic decision-making.

Are Asset Managers Falling Behind Other Industries?

While market intelligence data is available for overall market flows by asset classes, product type, and geographical regions, asset managers often lack the same level of insight into their own sales and distribution activity. 

In contrast, industries such as retail and automotive have long leveraged detailed sales data to refine their strategies. Supermarkets, for example, have near-instant visibility into who is buying what, at what price, and through which channel. Asset management, particularly in EMEA, has historically underinvested in structuring and analysing these core data sets, resulting in a fragmented and incomplete view of client behaviour. 

To compete effectively, asset managers need to invest to harmonise AUM, flow, and client data into a single, structured model. A CBOR—enhanced by integrating CRM records, TA feeds, as well as IBOR and ABOR data—will enable firms to generate more reliable analytics. With this foundation, Sales and Distribution teams can access faster, deeper insights to strengthen client relationships, optimise distribution strategies, and drive profitability.

While a CBOR provides a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making, its effectiveness is further shaped by regional market structures. In EMEA, the complexity of TA data can obscure the underlying investor across multiple layers, making it difficult for firms to accurately identify and engage clients. In North America, firms typically have clearer client visibility through broker networks, but they still face significant challenges in aggregating vast volumes of data to understand AUM, fund flows, and asset mix. These regional differences reinforce the case for an enhanced CBOR, ensuring global asset managers have the transparency and structured data needed to drive informed decision-making across markets.

The Complexities of Achieving a Unified Client View 

Combining siloed data

The schematic above illustrates the various data sets that are critical to building a complete client view. From the Investment Book of Record (IBOR), which tracks live positions, to the Accounting Book of Record (ABOR), which holds NAVs, these data sets can have multiple potential sources for AUM and flow data. These sources need to be harmonised, along with the traditional Transfer Agent (TA) data set, to achieve a total client view.

Each data set must be discovered, evaluated, and, if deemed valuable, integrated. This process requires business knowledge, collaboration, technical data development, and alignment with future operating models to succeed.

Product alignment 

A product for the investment desks is typically based on portfolios or sleeves of accounts in the IBOR. Retail TA data, on the other hand, is based on funds and share class products. While sales and distribution teams also work with fund and share classes, they are additionally concerned with strategies that group funds, segregated mandates, and sub-advised products.

This shows that terms like fund, portfolio, account, sleeve, and share class can mean different things to different teams within the organisation. To reconcile these differences, a firm needs a comprehensive product master that defines and maintains classifications and hierarchy of all ‘product’ items. The product master serves as the foundation for unifying data and enabling consistent reporting and analysis across the business.

Client mapping and look-through

To complicate matters, client look-through is a significant challenge. Mapping the names supplied in AUM and flow data to in-house CRM client records is another fundamental step in achieving a unified client view. 

Multinational clients such as UBS or HSBC may be represented differently in external data feeds compared to the CRM, leading to discrepancies. Without proper mapping, AUM and flows will be misrepresented, causing reconciliation issues between financial and sales reporting. 

A TA nominee account can further obscure underlying clients, making it difficult to attribute AUM accurately. For example, “Nominee” names associated with disintermediated platforms like Clearstream or Euroclear may be misinterpreted as large AUM holders. If a manager cannot obtain a data feed from the platform and map the underlying clients, they risk inaccurate data usage.

The complexity increases with “omnibus” accounts held by platforms, where flows to the TA may be misattributed to larger bank platforms rather than the true underlying clients. To resolve this, an additional data feed is required to properly allocate flows and gain a clear client view. 

Implementation Roadmap to Better Client Visibility

Is this a Technology issue that can be solved by a software implementation? 

Unfortunately, no. While a robust data engine is a cornerstone of the solution, success requires a cross-functional strategy aligned with a core CBOR data model and sustainable operating models to maintain mappings, data updates, and system changes.

Significant tooling requirements mean that firms look either to specialised vendors for solutions or build in-house systems. Niche vendors offer software specifically designed to address these challenges, with varying levels of adoption and investment. In-house systems offer flexibility but demand extensive maintenance and coding to remain effective.

Tech and Data teams must be heavily involved from the outset, but true success hinges on full engagement from Sales, Distribution, and Finance—ultimately driven by C-suite leadership. The project will require difficult conversations and top-level decisions to enact fundamental operational changes that realise the full value of a unified client view.

Six Steps to Attaining a Unified Client View

Stage 1: Current state discovery

A quick assessment of the current state to inform the future roadmap.

• Sales team structure: Client coverage models (teams vs. individual allocation) and geographic segmentation.
• CRM operating model and data quality: What’s its current role, and how reliable is the data?
• Sales and Finance reporting: Data sources, reporting structures, and integration points.
• Product master data: How it integrates with AUM and flow data.

This analysis will reveal strengths and weaknesses of the current setup, the size of the technical effort, the immediate and long-term benefits, and any necessary organisational change.

Stage 2: Project structure and tooling selection 

Using insights from Stage 1, define core requirements and deliverables across organisational changes, third-party interactions, and technology. Workstreams should align with these deliverables, and if necessary, an RFP process can be initiated for tooling. The goal is to create a framework that integrates external and internal data sources, laying the foundations to start homogenising the data for a unified client view.

Stage 3: First pass visibility—Mapping external client records to CRM 

The first step toward unifying the client view is the mapping of the TA, segregated mandate, and sub-advised client names from external sources to a CRM entity. As this is iterated and refined, the accuracy of salesperson coverage, AUM, and flow data attributed to sales activity, and C-suite reporting will become more precise. 

Stage 4: Revenue integration

With the data silos breaking down, rebate and revenue data can be mapped to the unified client view, further enhancing AUM and flow data across the organisation.

Stage 5: Client look-through

While Stage 3 will highlight major nominee accounts that obscure underlying clients, achieving full client look-through requires:

• Securing additional data feeds.
• Establishing an operating model to support ongoing mapping.

While complex, this step provides a competitive edge, delivering analysis and insights that many industry peers lack.

Stage 6: Using client data for profitability 

It is a bold goal to pull a view together to trace profitability and drive growth, especially where teams may have a vested self-interest to protect their position, but my experience in the industry is that no one has really achieved this! With a unified client view, if revenue data is mapped across the product range and linked to investment desks and operational costs, the C-suite gains unprecedented visibility: 

• Identifying underperforming products that drain profitability.
• Pinpointing high-value products driving outsized returns.

Achieving this requires serious investment, of both time and money, but the benefits would be huge for a C-suite looking to optimise profitability.

At the heart of it, obtaining a unified client view may present as a traditional data integration challenge across silos. Different owners. Different sources. Different identifiers. However, this roadmap underscores that achieving true client visibility isn’t just a technology challenge—it’s a firm-wide transformation—and the benefits for the C-suite are clear. With a unified total client view, firms can obtain insights that drive profitability and strategic growth.