CERES FTS · CERIUM
Twenty years implementing reporting and BI solutions for clients showed us — the same problems keep surfacing.
So we built the answer. Cerium is an AI platform for financial services — it takes you from just reporting data to deriving insights that drive real decisions.
Cerium · Attribution Studio · demo data
The Problem
The current platforms help streamline data and reporting, but do they tell the full story?
Ceres FTS has implemented order and execution management systems, rebuilt trade surveillance and regulatory reporting, moved data estates to the cloud, and staffed the teams that operate them. The BI tools in market provided governed metrics, live data and self-service. Yet, engagement after engagement, the same problems were waiting on the other side of a successful implementation.
Self-service gave everyone a blank canvas.
Thousands of people can now build their own view without raising a ticket, which removed the queue at the data team’s door but created multiple versions of the truth.
Cerium does the analytical work, not just the data access. A client asks a question in the meeting and gets a reasoned answer with the evidence attached — rather than a different view created for every client or meeting.
Real-time data. Week-old answers.
Risk moved from T+1 to intraday. Positions refresh in seconds and the dashboard is never stale. The query is faster but the answers still take time.
Cerium runs the investigation, not just the query. It ranks the drivers behind a movement, tests the obvious alternatives, and returns the causal account in minutes — so the speed you paid for in the warehouse actually reaches the decision.
One trusted number. Five different explanations.
They provide governed metrics. One definition of net return, one source, lineage back to the row, but the “why” is still left to the users to work out.
Cerium governs the explanation as well. The decomposition of a movement — which desks, which fees, which periods, which positions — is computed the same way every time, from the same model, and shows its working. The committee argues about the decision instead of about whose spreadsheet is right.
A copilot that reads the chart back to you.
Natural-language assistants now summarise a dashboard and write the query you were going to write. Useful, but still relies on the user to ask the right question.
Cerium reasons over your entire dataset, not over the isolated graph or dashboard. It knows your fee schedules, mandate limits, benchmarks and share classes, cites the rows it used, and will tell you when the data doesn’t support a conclusion. Description is not the same thing as analysis.
And underneath all four — the data itself.
Positions from the custodian, transactions from the administrator, prices from two vendors and fees from a spreadsheet somebody maintains still arrive in different formats, with different identifiers, at different times — and every month a handful of records are late, duplicated, or simply absent. The quiet failures don’t throw errors. A single missing price or an unmapped security just makes the answer wrong, and the dashboard reports it with the same confidence as everything else.
Cerium resolves the sources into one governed model — identifiers reconciled, currencies aligned, corporate actions applied — and where a record is missing or contradicts another source it flags it and shows you rather than quietly filling the gap. Every figure traces back to the row it came from, so when a number looks wrong you can tell in seconds whether the calculation broke or the input did.
Every one of these platforms delivers what it promised. But the work of explaining the number, and deciding what to do about it, never moved. It still sits with a handful of people who are already fully booked. That is the part Cerium does.
Three Ways In
How Cerium can serve you.
Cerium is a complete platform. Most firms come to us in one of three positions — replace the whole stack, replace the layer underneath it, or replace the layer on top of it. Cerium is built to be bought all three ways, so the decision is driven by what suits your business rather than what suits our software.
Replace what you are running.
Cerium runs as SaaS or fully on-premise, at a materially lower total cost of ownership than the platforms it replaces, and with the capabilities those platforms have been promising for years. The part firms worry about is the switch, so we solved that first: Cerium migrates your existing configuration — models, metric definitions, dashboards, permissions — rather than asking your team to rebuild it. Implementation runs in weeks rather than months, and five years of encoded institutional knowledge comes across with you instead of being wiped.
Keep your BI. Replace what feeds it.
Cerium sits at the data layer and does the work your analysts currently do by hand: ingesting from custodians, administrators, vendors and internal systems, reconciling identifiers, aligning currencies, applying corporate actions, and flagging the records that are missing or contradict each other. It then serves a single governed model straight into Power BI, Tableau, Looker or whatever your teams already use. Nothing changes on screen. Everything changes underneath it — the numbers arrive faster, reconcile cleanly, and can be traced back to the row they came from.
Keep your data access. Replace the front end.
Your warehouse, your pipelines and your existing access paths stay exactly as they are. What Cerium replaces is the ageing visualisation layer sitting on top of them — and it replaces it with something that does more than draw charts. Ask why a number moved and Cerium ranks the drivers and shows the working. It surfaces the exception before the client does, forecasts the position, and recommends the action. Decision aids, in other words, rather than another set of dashboards nobody has time to interpret.
Nobody should have to throw away five years of configuration to get a better platform.
Why We Built It
Built by the people who have been inside the systems.
Most AI platforms in financial services are built by AI companies learning finance. Cerium was built the other way around.
Ceres FTS has spent two decades in the trenches of front office platforms, trading systems, investment compliance, and cloud data migration — as consultants, as integrators, and as the firm that staffs the teams running them day to day. We know what the data actually looks like when it arrives, why the reconciliation breaks, and which four questions a portfolio manager asks first. Cerium is the accumulation of that, turned into software.
Cerium operates as its own company under Ceres Group, with a dedicated engineering team and its own roadmap.
20+ yrs
Inside front office, trading, compliance and data platforms
100+
Financial-services engagements delivered
Boston
50 Federal St · part of the Ceres Group
Who It’s For
Five kinds of firm, five versions of the same question.
Cerium is built for the places where the cost of a slow answer is measured in basis points.
Asset & portfolio management
Attribution that explains itself. Why a strategy underperformed its benchmark, decomposed to the position, before the investment committee meets rather than after.
Private equity
Portfolio company reporting normalised on arrival, so organic growth, margin and leverage read across the whole portfolio instead of one company at a time.
Wealth advisory
Advisors who can answer a client’s question in the meeting. Portfolio drift, fee impact, and household-level performance without an analyst in the loop.
Brokerages
Order flow, execution quality, and client profitability read together instead of in four systems. Exceptions surfaced before the regulator asks.
Payment processors
Volume, decline rates, and settlement variance explained at the merchant level, with forecasts that hold up against a board.
See what your dashboards have been leaving out.
Cerium has its own home, its own team, and a product you can look at properly.