Robeco enters into a strategic partnership with Microsoft to strengthen its competitive advantage in the sustainable investment market

“At Robeco, we want to accommodate our clients’ view of the world and help them achieve their goals. Cloud technology allows us to do that. As an organization, we can now adapt to the market and drive change instantly instead of waiting three weeks for the next release cycle, as we had to do previously.”

Wouter Tilgenkamp, Portfolio Manager for Quantitative Equities at Robeco, is reflecting on his company’s evolving needs and the recent technological leap it has taken to ensure its future competitiveness.

“Robeco is an investment company at heart, but we are becoming more and more data-driven and technology-focused,” says Tilgenkamp. “There's just so much information in the world these days that we can’t afford to have hundreds of analysts in-house dig through each individual piece of information we have.

“Luckily for us, we don’t need to. Technology allows us to collect insights more effectively and support our decision processes helping us to provide informed recommendations to our client.”

Scaling up faster to stay ahead

Founded in Rotterdam in 1929, Robeco is an international asset management company that offers a wide range of active investments from equities to bonds. Next to Rotterdam, it currently employs staff across the globe, in Zurich, New York, China, and Singapore. 

Accustomed to thriving in changing circumstances, the company now needs to adapt to an increasingly diverse investment market, which requires it to tailor its services to the specific needs of different clients – especially when it comes to sustainability.

“Sustainability is such a hot topic today, and everybody's jumping on it,” explains Lennart Prins, Product Owner at Robeco’s Sustainable Investing division. “Robeco has more than 25 years of experience with sustainable research. We have a wealth of SI data and have been launching sustainable strategies long before many other companies in our sector. We want to remain at the forefront, which means we have to move very quickly. But at the same time, we want to do it properly.”

Robeco launched its first sustainable investing product in 1995 and has been leading the sector ever since by combining wealth creation and well-being and integrating sustainability into their investments and operations.

This has led the company to create Investments Bespoke Solutions (IBS), a division which allows it to provide tailored service for Robeco’s investors with a particular focus on sustainability.

Essential to it is processing huge volumes of data, which, until recently, was causing a bottleneck. Wouter Tilgenkamp explains: “A couple of years ago we had an application technology stack which was not really scalable. We could do maybe four portfolios a day, where actually we had over a hundred portfolios.”

“We were running into issues, and we could not go further the way that we were currently doing it. For us this was really a catalyst to embracing the cloud because it could give us the scalability to manage the ever-increasing volumes of data in our bespoke applications.”

A cloud platform to break the bottleneck

What Robeco needed to accelerate the deployment of updated portfolios was a highly scalable platform working across the entire organization and capable of delivering data-tailored applications for core business teams.

The data would then help create the applications needed to facilitate stock purchasing and selling decisions and thus ensure the portfolios they managed stayed on track, both in terms of policy and profitability.

This had to work for all parts of the operation too. “The way that IBS is structured is that there are four separate teams who each have their own value streams,” explains Rutger Bruijnzeel – Product Owner of Fixed Income at Robeco. “We needed cloud-native applications that could get data delivered for everyone irrespective of their location and also that pushed us to think beyond our Rotterdam office.”

The solution, he explains, is a shared infrastructure working for Robeco’s four IBS teams – Quantitative Equity, Fixed Income, and two for Sustainable Investing.

Within it, each team can build and support its own value stream with its own set of applications. Among the platforms it supports is a platform for Robeco’s proprietary Sustainability Development Goals framework that manages which companies are suitable for investment based on a vast set of predetermined rules.

It also supports an ecosystem to rebalance Robeco’s Quant Equity portfolios in a scalable, hyper customizable fashion – as well as a one-stop shop for portfolio managers and traders to create and calculate orders on bonds and fixed income derivatives.

Implementing a platform for all

Robeco is now using various products including Azure Kubernetes Services, to build scalable applications and support core business processes. Embracing Azure was a logical choice for the company, as Robeco was already using Microsoft products which were already well integrated within its processes.

The company implemented event-driven microservices architecture in their application landscape, incorporating best practices/design patterns and the Azure well-architected framework. These include among others: onion layer architecture, CQRS and domain driven design.

The team utilized Azure DevOps as a key approach to implementation. Its tools and practices helped facilitate automation and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, emphasizing team empowerment, communication, and collaboration.

Faster data updates for a competitive advantage

The new technology stack has been fully operational since late 2022 and is now a one-platform-fits-all for generating – made possible, among others, also by Azure Cost Management, Azure Monitor, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.

According to Robeco, it’s already helping to improve the speed of individual developers and has decreased the production cycle time by 45%. The organization can now implement changes and features more rapidly without compromising the quality of the solutions.

Now, the company can bring new features to production for 15 separate services on average every day – and is capable of building, testing, and deploying a new feature in as little as 30 minutes. In just one day, the team also can create an entirely new micro service and put it into production.

"We can now update data for all solutions at least daily, so we can be far more certain the products we offer clients are optimal – both in terms of return and sustainability objectives,” says Lennart Prins. “Portfolio managers can make quicker investment decisions for their portfolios or traders can put out new orders more easily.”

Tailoring these products is important, he continues – but it’s essential to do it quickly. “The more we can tailor the products we offer our clients, the more likely they are to select us. If a requirement takes us six months to implement, they might go somewhere else.

“If we can turn it around in a few days or a week, and immediately all the systems are updated, it's a much easier sell of course. With regards to the new IP that's being developed on the business side, for example, on climate scores, the methodology was finalized in 2023, and we're already going to production with the supporting tool in a few weeks.”

Looking ahead

Robeco is already planning to build on the AKS platform. In addition to fine-tuning the technology for optimal results, their ambition extends to further innovation and includes being at the forefront of new technologies that will shape the investment landscape.

There are three key aspects to Robeco’s ongoing strategy, explains Mark van Rees, Cloud Solution Architect at IBS. “The first is the front office architecture. which entails the full investments value chain including operations and risk management,” he says.

“The second is data, which will be centralized in one place and will be accessible to all, in minutes instead of weeks with proper authorization and governance by default. And thirdly, cloud technology. We want to maximize its benefit and limit the business impact of our cloud migration by leading it as a coordinated effort – ensuring the data center gets fully emptied, legacy is cleaned up, and dependencies with other programs are managed.”

The development teams aim to have practices in place to help guarantee this culture of innovation and ensure that existing applications remain both fit for their current purposes and future-proof. Part of that commitment is to try and squeeze the development time from code to cloud by an ambitious 50% for the engineering team.

In addition to in-depth expertise, high-performing teams are also influenced by transparent processes and an open working culture. These positive aspects, which have been successfully cultivated by the manager of IBS - Esther Vonck - are already being reflected in the current employee turnover, which remains low over the course of the year.

And as Robeco’s and Microsoft’s relationship with increasingly advanced technologies, such as AI, continues to deepen, it helps guarantee that the company will attract IT talent and expertise to drive its ambitions.