On Oct. 29, 2026, Brisbane-based investment technology provider Jacobi Strategies announced the launch of the Jacobi Investment Management Harness. Known simply as the Harness, this new infrastructure is designed to give institutional investment teams a governed, secure route to transition proprietary artificial intelligence prototypes into live production workflows.

The launch addresses a critical bottleneck in the financial technology sector. While modern AI tools have successfully reduced the time required to prototype new investment ideas from months to mere days, the infrastructure required to scale and govern these models has lagged behind.

The Production Bottleneck in Institutional AI

In many institutional investment settings, advanced AI models and prototypes remain siloed. They frequently run within isolated spreadsheets or sit on individual laptops. This lack of centralized infrastructure presents significant operational and regulatory risks. When a governing board, auditor, or regulator requests information regarding which model version is currently live, what specific data was utilized, or who authorized its deployment, traditional investment technology stacks often fail to provide clear answers.

According to Tony Mackenzie, Co-Founder and CEO of Jacobi Strategies, the primary constraint for investment firms is no longer the generation of ideas, but rather the infrastructure required to carry them.

"The distance between a brilliant investment idea and a live client portfolio is often measured in months of technical debt, governance hurdles and infrastructure complexity,“ Mackenzie stated. ”At Jacobi, we help firms bridge that gap, turning proprietary investment thinking into scalable, audit-ready solutions that create measurable value for clients."

A Four-Layered Architecture for Portfolio Outcomes

The Harness serves as the connective tissue designed to scale a firm's proprietary investment logic across the Jacobi platform. By doing so, it ensures that intellectual property does not remain trapped in the prototype phase but actively powers portfolio outcomes. The system packages Jacobi's long-standing delivery capabilities, accelerated by AI, into four distinct layers built upon one client-specific entity data model:

  • Foundation Multi-Asset Platform: This layer provides core capabilities for portfolio construction, risk analytics, reporting, and embedded AI agents. These tools are structured specifically around each individual firm's unique operational processes.
  • AI Workbench: A governed development environment that connects directly to live portfolio data and production infrastructure, allowing teams to build and test models safely.
  • Production Infrastructure: This layer features private deployments, API governance, and comprehensive audit trails. It is engineered to move workflows into production while delivering deterministic, audit-ready results.
  • Forward Deployed Engineering: Technical investment experts from Jacobi partner directly with client investment teams. These experts build on the AI Workbench, deploy systems to production, and ultimately hand back a fully operational system that the client owns and operates independently.

Governance, Ownership, and Intellectual Property

A key differentiator of the Harness is its focus on open architecture and private deployments. Jacobi, which was founded in 2014, designed its platform to allow firms to extend the technology using their own code, models, data, analytics, and applications. This approach ensures that investment teams retain complete ownership of their intellectual property rather than becoming locked into a closed vendor ecosystem.

By providing secure, private deployments with full audit trails and API governance, the Harness directly targets the compliance challenges that have previously slowed down AI adoption among top-tier investors. The ability to deliver deterministic, audit-ready results allows institutional teams to satisfy regulatory demands while continuing to innovate at pace.

Market Impact and Target Ecosystem

The introduction of the Harness is positioned to impact a wide range of institutional players. Jacobi currently provides its technology to top-tier investors globally, a group that includes leading asset and wealth managers, pension funds, asset owners, and investment consultants.

By bridging the gap between rapid prototyping and institutional-grade production, the Harness aims to eliminate the technical debt and governance hurdles that have historically delayed the deployment of proprietary investment strategies.