MANAOS looks inside the fund

A pension fund buys a fund. Inside that fund are companies, bonds and perhaps other funds. The investment has a name, a price and a place in a spreadsheet. Yet answering a seemingly smaller question - what, exactly, does it own? - can require another round of requests to another set of people. Sustainable investing begins here, with the rather unsustainable business of chasing files.

MANAOS, the investment-services platform developed by BNP Paribas subsidiary AELX SAS, has made this awkward preliminary task its business. Its proposition is easy to underestimate. Before discussing a portfolio’s carbon exposure or biodiversity risks, establish the portfolio. Then make the information travel.

The fund is only the first envelope

The project started in BNP’s innovation lab in 2019. An early use case addressed fund look-through for Solvency II: collecting portfolio inventories so investors could see the assets beneath their fund investments. Think of opening an envelope and discovering several smaller envelopes. The label on the outside tells you surprisingly little about the contents.

MANAOS collects inventories from asset managers, harmonises their data and enables analysis of underlying holdings. This tackles a specific operational nuisance: information arriving from several organisations in several formats. Its implementation partner, Onepoint, now Wepoint, described confidential portfolio compositions being exchanged by email, with manual processing poorly suited to the volumes involved.

The engineering followed the problem. Onepoint worked with MANAOS on public-cloud architecture, security and user experience. The commercial insight was that this shared foundation could support more than one service. Once holdings are usable, each new analytical question need not begin with another inventory collection exercise.

An app store for the people behind the portfolio

In March 2021, MANAOS announced a partnership with Clarity AI. Util and V.E, part of Moody’s ESG Solutions, followed that July. The platform was becoming a distribution point for sustainability specialists: bring the portfolio to one environment, then connect it to the services needed to understand it.

That distinction matters. A ratings provider sells its assessment. MANAOS organises access to assessments and other data from multiple providers. By May 2024, BNP Paribas reported a catalogue of more than 20 providers, 260 applications and 63,000 indicators. These are dated catalogue figures, rather than a count of independent companies or a measure of analytical accuracy.

There is useful variety behind the menus. LBP AM’s GREaT methodology became available in 2023, allowing its issuer ratings to be connected to client portfolios. RepRisk added business-conduct risk information. Confluence brought SFDR reporting services, including European ESG Templates and investor disclosures. The products address different jobs; a controversy signal and a regulatory document are hardly interchangeable.

“Investors are looking for choice, flexibility and user-friendly tools”

Sébastien Messean, then General Manager of Manaos, May 2022

Follow the insurer, not the sales pitch

Customers make the abstraction easier to understand. In May 2022, Fondo di Previdenza Mario Negri, the Italian pension fund, selected MANAOS for ESG data and analytics. The announcement put the fund’s assets at €3.9 billion. Its need was straightforward: source sustainability information and examine the portfolio through it.

La Mutuelle Générale supplied another example in January 2024. The French insurer selected MANAOS for ESG data collection and reporting, including climate and biodiversity dashboards. BNP Paribas had already provided custody and financing services to the insurer since 2004. The new mandate added a different view of the investments to an established relationship.

The customer’s own 2025 responsible-investment report supplies the interesting sequel. It describes using MANAOS, fed by MSCI data, to assess companies with physical assets in deforestation areas and other biodiversity-sensitive locations. This is a concrete analytical task: connect financial holdings to information about the world in which the underlying businesses operate.

Buy the connections. Keep the judgement.

MANAOS sells professional software and data services to institutions. Its advertised approach is modular and “pay as you grow”; clients can source partner licences through the platform or bring existing licences. That makes data procurement part of the workflow. The practical cost question includes the platform service, the chosen datasets and the rights attached to their use.

The alternatives depend on the job. An investor can buy directly from an ESG specialist, maintain its own integration infrastructure or use a broader investment data platform. FINBOURNE’s LUSID, for example, consolidates investment data across systems. MANAOS’s particular pitch combines fund look-through, a multi-provider ESG marketplace and reporting within the BNP Paribas investment-services ecosystem.

Convenient connections still leave decisions with the investor. Missing holdings constrain look-through; gaps in provider coverage constrain analysis. Different methodologies can produce different answers. These are practical limits of the workflow, rather than evidence of a MANAOS failure. A buyer should test a representative portfolio, inspect coverage and confirm licence permissions before building reporting routines around the results.

The company’s own stated values put client service alongside impact, expertise and team spirit. Those aspirations fit the kind of work on display: finance specialists and technologists sorting out exchanges between institutions. They also make the user experience consequential. A reporting tool has to make sense to the person responsible for the numbers, not simply to the developer who knows where every field came from.

The next useful thing is a file checker

The expansion has followed those routines. MANAOS introduced UK SDR tools in May 2024 and announced a London office in May 2025. In July 2025 it advertised a free TPTv7 fund-inventory file quality checker. The small feature is revealing: even a marketplace full of sophisticated analytics still benefits from a properly formed input file.

There is a lesson here for anyone building business software. Start with the repeated chore that prevents the next job from happening. Make its output reusable. MANAOS’s story gives that lesson a particularly literal form: open the fund, organise the contents, and give the next person something they can work with.