Company
A leading Asia based asset manager operating in 11 major markets and managing over USD 214 billion of assets on behalf of institutional and retail clients. Operating in Asia since 1994, our client is part of an international financial services group, and has one of the widest footprints across the region.
They provide investment solutions across a broad range of asset classes including:
– Equities
– Fixed Income
– Multi-Asset Solutions
– Quantitative Investment Solutions
– Alternatives
Business Challenge
The asset management industry in which our client operates is highly competitive and regulated. The capability of the asset manager to operate and report accurate information on their products is key to success and compliance.
Project leaders were faced with many obstacles while working on a MifID2 project. They had to provide a large amount of key information to distribution partners in Europe so they can meet requirements under the new regulations,
Some of the key challenges discovered during this process were:
- Teams operated a lot of information in a number of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and saved it in a manner that was useful to them but not useful for dissemination outside of the organisation.
- Different sets of product data were maintained by different functions in Microsoft Excel
- Different systems used different unique identifiers for data and different definitions for the same data
- An enormous amount of manual work was taking place within finance, operations and product teams.
These challenges were further magnified by the fact that they are a very distributed organisation. Compiling and consolidating data from many areas of the business is a complex job, particularly considering the different types and formats that the data appears in.
Collating this information across different products, functions and different business units across 11 markets was incredibly challenging. It also created a patchwork of fragmented processes and could have resulted in inconsistencies, errors and duplicate work. Meanwhile, regulators and distributors were demanding more and more data points.
Our client quickly realised a central solution was essential.
Solution
Our client conducted research across the market into what options were available and Fundipedia stood out as one that exceeded the firm’s requirements. They embarked on a project and implementation was complete within just a few months.
Key Business Benefits
Gathering information in all the different systems, platforms, identifiers that we use across those platforms and creating a single source of truth in Fundipedia created a large number of processes efficiency gains across all levels of the business.
A single source of truth
No more mismatches and user errors across the organisation. Fundipedia provides much greater transparency and oversight of the reporting process, not to mention a clear audit trail of how data has changed and data lineage.
Self-service
Fundipedia is available to everyone in the organisation with a few exceptions of limited access to some data fields for certain teams. This has empowered end-users to build downstream controls themselves, thus significantly increasing business agility without additional overhead.
Reduced workload
Before Fundipedia, the product team was doing ad-hoc and regular reports manually. Fundipedia has automated all internal and external reporting whilst increasing overall report accuracy.
Regulatory agility
By cutting out time-consuming processes such as documenting requirements and handing over the build to a separate team, end users can accelerate the deployment of the controls and checks required for robust regulatory reporting.
Operational resilience
A flexible, cloud-based system is easier to access for the distributed teams and does not require onsite maintenance. This creates a sustainable, scalable and cost-effective environment to support further innovation.
Innovation
Fundipedia is entirely API driven, which means that our client can quickly bolt on additional benefits such as building workflows around the automation and management of the fund setup process and much more.