How AI orchestration enables scaling in investment management

Most investment firms are deploying AI but can't scale it. The barrier isn't capability — it's orchestration. SimCorp and Microsoft have built the connective layer that turns isolated agents into governed, compounding workflows for institutional investors, so AI delivers business impact rather than fragmenting across silos.

According to the 2026 InvestOps report, 63% of investment firms still lack a unified data layer and only 20% of firms operate on a single platform. AI models trained on siloed data deliver incomplete predictions. And fragmented systems produce conflicting outputs that erode confidence and amplify existing problems rather than solving them. Firms moving decisively now will complete multiple AI adoption cycles by 2027. Those that don't will find the capability gap increasingly difficult to close. SimCorp and Microsoft have partnered to build an orchestrated agentic AI ecosystem to close this gap.

Why fragmentation stalls AI at the pilot stage

When agents operate in isolation, they produce inconsistent outputs, duplicate effort, and create governance blind spots that compound over time. Introduce agents from multiple vendors without a unifying foundation, and you add technical and data silos, friction at every integration point, and invisible walls against the multi-agent collaboration that makes AI genuinely transformative.

SimCorp addresses this directly, connecting agents under a single orchestration framework. Built in partnership with Microsoft, it is designed to be the connective layer that turns disconnected agentic AI capabilities into a coherent, scalable system.

Agentic AI only creates business impact when orchestration, security, and compliance are built-in from the start. Supporting SimCorp on their journey to become a Frontier company, we're focused on enabling governed, multi-agent workflows that the industry can trust.

Christian Sarafidis, Chief Executive EMEA Financial Services, Microsoft

That's why SimCorp is moving from isolated AI feature development to a platform-centric approach. This is a commitment to intelligence that flows across the entire investment lifecycle rather than sitting inside individual features. That means capabilities and agents integrated natively into SimCorp One, within the same secure, compliant, auditable environment clients already trust, with agents from multiple sources working together seamlessly and maintaining complete decision provenance.

What orchestration does and why it changes the equation

The firms that succeed with agentic AI will need the best orchestration, not necessarily the most agents

Xiaopeng Li, Senior Director, AI & Insights, SimCorp

Real investment workflows require multiple specialized agents working together: risk analysis, optimization, compliance validation, and execution. Without orchestration, each integration becomes custom work requiring manual intervention to bridge systems. Technical silos deepen with each new agent added from a new vendor, especially when they do not embrace industry-wide open protocols.

Think about how investment teams should work: each member provides context and fluid communication to make informed decisions. The value of that cross-functional collaboration vastly exceeds what any individual could produce working alone. Agent orchestration is the same principle applied to agentic AI. We're shifting investment operations from scattered, disconnected agents working in silos, to a well-orchestrated and governed team of agents that speak the same language, share the same knowledge, and work seamlessly with each other.

This separates pilots from production. A pilot proves an agent can analyze credit risk. A production-grade solution means that an agent works with others across a complete workflow, and you can trace every decision, maintain governance, and add new capabilities without breaking existing ones. Investment professionals stick to their current ways of working because they trust them. AI must earn that same trust.

Increased AI adoption brings increased concern for control, and rightly so. Investment professionals love their excel models because they can control them, not because they resist new technology, but because they need to ensure transparency and accountability. The SimCorp platform maintains that control while multiplying capability. Risk controls and regulatory compliance scale automatically as AI scales, because they're enforced at the core platform level, not implemented separately for each agent. Earning the trust that investment professionals place in their Excel models is the standard we hold ourselves to.

How SimCorp addresses the agentic silos

Most agentic architectures solve half the problem. They make individual agents capable, but leave the harder questions unanswered: How do agents collaborate without creating new coordination costs? Who is accountable when a multi-agent workflow produces a flawed output? How do you avoid trading one set of silos for another?

SimCorp addressed this challenge directly with a platform-centric approach. Product teams at SimCorp use Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Foundry, and GitHub Copilot to build production-grade agents fast, at scale. As the foundation, SimCorp is building an agent orchestration layer with Microsoft Agent Framework which supports open protocols like A2A and MCP. This is a deliberate choice to enable interoperability and extensibility at scale. The result? Agents from SimCorp, the partners and the clients can seamlessly collaborate with each other, with shared context and end-to-end governance.

A portfolio manager’s morning, reimagined

Overnight an oil price shock hits which has dramatically affected growth forecasts across the major economies. Before the market opens, the question is already forming: is this risk priced into the market correctly? For most portfolio managers today, answering that question requires a lengthy workflow. It means investigating across multiple risk systems, optimization tools, portfolio management platforms, and order management systems before a single trade can be validated and acted on.

With SimCorp One, that workflow is simplified. The portfolio manager describes the risk scenarios they want to test in plain language, without any configuration or system switching. They validate the results, then describe the optimization constraints and risk targets they want applied, refining parameters through a back-and-forth conversation as they would with a colleague. Compliance rules are applied automatically while the platform generates the optimal portfolio and associated order flow.

What remains is a visual review of current and future portfolio state, a final human decision, and a single click to commit. So, what would have taken the morning is now actioned in minutes, driven by market knowledge rather than system knowledge. This is what genuine orchestration delivers: a single, unified and coherent workflow.

Frontier firms deploy agents as digital colleagues, working alongside people, not around them. With SimCorp, we’re building the orchestration and interoperability needed to make those human‑agent workflows real in investment operations.

Christian Sarafidis, Chief Executive EMEA Financial Services, Microsoft

The choice firms face in 2026

One path leads to fragmented agent collections: integration chaos, mounting technical debt, pilots that never scale, AI deployment that creates new risks instead of managing existing ones. The other leads to orchestrated platforms where value compounds, governance comes by default, and agentic workflows collaborate effectively instead of crossing each other.

Firms building on unified platforms in 2026 will complete multiple AI adoption cycles and build operational capabilities that widen with every workflow. Those still accumulating point solutions face a gap that only grows.

Orchestrated AI agents, governed by default and connected through a unified platform, compound in value with every workflow they complete. That is what SimCorp, together with Microsoft, is building.