Platform Advisory
Charles River IMS advisory for buy-side teams selecting, implementing, recovering, or optimizing CRD. Start with implementation risk, then size the work: scan, diagnostic, compliance audit, sprint, delivery, or retainer.
Charles River IMS advisory path
Charles River IMS work can be a diagnostic, a focused advisory sprint, a full implementation, or an ongoing retainer. PBW routes the situation before selling the engagement.
Use when leadership has a concern, but needs fast triage before commissioning a full diagnostic.
02 CRD Readiness Diagnostic $7.5K-$9.5K | 10 business daysReview workflow, data, integration, compliance, UAT, and cutover readiness before the plan hardens.
03 Compliance Rule Mapping Audit $12.5K-$25K | scoped auditUse when CRD rules are noisy, stale, hard to defend, or dependent on manual overrides and undocumented mandate interpretation.
04 Advisory or Delivery $25K-$150K | scoped executionMove into a sprint, implementation, optimization engagement, or fractional OMS retainer.
What we deliver
End-to-end Charles River IMS deployments — order management, portfolio management, compliance, and execution management. We scope to your trading workflows, not a generic template. From signed SOW to production go-live in a defined timeline with no scope creep.
FIX 4.2/4.4/5.0 connectivity to brokers, ECNs, and execution algorithms. Order routing configuration, algo parameter mapping, and certification management with your prime broker technology teams. We have established relationships that compress certification timelines.
Position and cash feeds from State Street, BNY, Northern Trust, Pershing, and others. IBOR/ABOR reconciliation architecture. Automated breaks management. If your operations team is manually reconciling positions that CRD should handle, this is the engagement.
Firms that implemented CRD two or three years ago often have workflows that reflect the consultant's convenience more than their own. We audit your current state, identify where automation has been left on the table, and deliver a tuned system — not a report.
Free · 30 minutes · No obligation
A preliminary implementation risk readout · Platform-fit discussion · Likely engagement model · No obligation · No generic sales process
Engagement shape
Charles River is a deep platform. A CRD implementation touches order management, portfolio rebalancing, compliance, execution, settlement, and reporting. Firms that go in without a tight implementation plan discover the scope midway through — and pay for it.
The design work is front-loaded. Every data flow, workflow, and integration point is documented before any configuration begins. What the discovery phase produces is a build specification, not a set of slides.
Full CRD implementations typically run 14–20 weeks. Integration-only engagements are scoped to the specific connection. Optimization projects run 4–8 weeks.
Structured working sessions with trading, portfolio management, operations, and compliance. Output: data flow diagrams, integration inventory, workflow specs, and a build plan signed off before any work begins.
CRD environment setup, workflow configuration, FIX session setup and certification, custodian feed development, and compliance rule implementation. Every deliverable tracked against the signed plan.
Formal user acceptance testing with your front-office and operations teams. Where applicable, parallel operation against your legacy system. Written issue log, resolution tracking, and formal sign-off gating production.
Managed cutover with on-call support through the initial production period. Written runbooks, operations procedures, and a knowledge transfer session your team can actually use.
The vendor-neutral advantage
CRD's portfolio data model differs from most legacy systems. Firms that skip the data mapping exercise discover misaligned position views, attribution errors, and compliance false positives after go-live.
Data mapping is a first-class deliverable, not a line item. We document every field transformation before build starts and test it against your actual portfolio data during UAT.
CRD's compliance engine is implemented at go-live and rarely revisited. As portfolios evolve and mandates change, rule coverage drifts — creating real compliance exposure that looks like a technology problem.
We build compliance rules from your current written mandate, not from the previous implementation. Existing CRD clients get a compliance rule audit as part of any optimization engagement.
Custodian feeds and FIX sessions that "work" at go-live are often fragile — no error handling, no monitoring, no documented recovery procedure. One schema change from the custodian breaks operations for a day.
Every integration we build includes error handling, monitoring hooks, and a written break/recovery procedure. We hand over documentation your operations team can use without calling us.
Engagement sizing
Start with a $1.5K scan when the question is bounded, a $7.5K-$9.5K readiness diagnostic when the implementation plan needs pressure-testing, or a dedicated compliance audit when rule reliability is the issue.
Looking for a Charles River IMS implementation specialist? See the CRD implementation consultant overview for context on engagement structure and active delivery experience. For compliance-specific work, the CRD compliance rule mapping page covers the mapping process in detail.
Whether you are pre-implementation or post-go-live, a 30-minute conversation with someone who has been through it establishes whether and how we can help.