The Investment management industry is highly regulated and requires to publish a lot of information relating to their investment strategy and performance to internal and external clients, research houses and industry regulators.
The Client
Our client was the one of five largest investment managers in Australia with more than $42 billion in assets under management. They have been helping Australians create and manage wealth since 1969. It operates in ANZ, and serves more than 5.4 million customers throughout A-PAC region.
The Need
The need was to provide a robust, highly flexible and scalable reporting platform to maximize the client's investment in various systems. The project was undertaken by the client as a part of large business transformation program, and it required someone with expertise in reporting methodologies and ability to understand the complexities involved in the busienss. The reporting solution was to provide solutions in following areas -
- Performance & Attribution - Fund, Sector and Asset level performance and attribution
- Exposure - Summary & Detailed exposure, GICS, Stock Holdings, Top/Bottom active, Top/Bottom by size, Portfolio Sizes & IMD reports
- Client Reporting – Monthly, Quarterly, Fund Fact Sheets
The Challenges
The Primary challenges this project faced was;
- Data Consolidation - Data for reporting was sourced from various systems such as Sylvan, Pirnha and other applications, as well as external parties such as JPM. The data was delivered in various formats through RDBMS, Excel, CSV files. The challenge was to validate, consolidate and provide a single view through the reporting architecture.
- Complexity – Sylvan is a very complex mathematical tool that calculates performance and attribution. It was a real challenge to query data out of Sylvan and format it.
- Architecture – Scalability was an issue as more and more users were expected to query the reports. So the reporting solution was to be deployed in multi-tier, web based architecture that will provide easy to use administration and delivery of reports.
The Solution
Inteliment played an important role in this project by providing technical expertise in conjunction with Client Reporting, P & A and Exposure teams. After a detailed analysis of the requirements, available technologies and deployment standards of the client, Inteliment designed a comprehensive and robust reporting infrastructure using FMC Pages and Microsoft Reporting tools. Our client engagement involved:
- Business requirement analysis
- Data analysis
- Design & Development of the three tier reporting architecture.
- Develop reports using VB 6.0, FMCPages and Excel VBA
- Research complex reporting logic and develop code for any gaps
- Analysis and modification of Cognos reports
- Design and develop automated deployment scripts for each component
- System and user acceptance testing support
- Ongoing production support (Both on-site and off-shore)
The Business Benefit
- The Attribution reporting which took about a week earlier, with the help of Inteliment’s solution is now delivered within minutes.
- Exposure Reports (IMD Formats) which previously took about 4-5 days to generate are now done in few seconds.
- The three tier architecture that Inteliment has designed & developed has reduced the maintenance of the system significantly.
- The response time of a Fund Manger & Business Analyst now with Inteliment generated reports has been reduced significantly providing our client competitive edge in the market place.
- Subsequent to Inteliment’s Reporting Solutions, Sylvan users increased from 4 users to 30 users.
