Overview

The provision of regular, timely and informative communications to the industry, advisers and investors alike is vital to the success of investment management companies both locally and internationally.

The challenges faced to achieve this generally revolve around a number of key areas – efficiency and accountability of data management, workflows and processes; compliance with both regulatory requirements and best practice guidelines; content and brand consistency; the responsibility to inform and educate all stakeholders with meaningful, factual and relevant data and information.

Ensuring that fund factsheets for collective investment scheme portfolios, are delivered with accurate and required content, in a timely fashion every month, far too commonly, proves to be an error prone, manual and iterative process, resulting in an unnecessary resource drain and an increase in operational risk. This is a challenge that impacts upon the business operations of every single management company in South Africa and, with new regulations looming, is a challenge that management companies can ill afford to take lightly.

Key Challenges

Momentum Collective Investments selected Factbook as their partner to assist them in addressing their investment reporting challenges, with their initial focus being on their fund factsheets, looking for Factbook to deliver a solution that provided the following:

• To automate and standardise the production of Momentum branded fund factsheets as the first phase of all of Momentum Collective Investments Funds.
• Faithful capture of a substantial number of data fields and sources
• The design of fund factsheet templates with differentiation for multi-asset, equity, global and fixed interest funds.
• Sourcing performance data from external providers, structured data storage and automated production of performance tables and graphs.
• Sourcing asset allocation data from the portfolio administration system, fund managers and external parties.
• Allowing for more complex asset allocation illustrations for fixed interest funds.

In Focus

Momentum Asset Management is a wholly-owned subsidiary of MMI Holdings Limited. MMI Holdings is the listed entity formed following the merger of Momentum and Metropolitan Life. The company operates from its offices in Sandton and Cape Town.

Momentum Collective Investments includes 36 Momentum branded unit trust funds as well as 175 Metropolitan Collective Investments (MET) co-branded third party unit trust funds.

The business is structured into autonomous teams who have full accountability for their performance outcomes which are focused on delivering to diverse client needs. While Momentum Asset Management has different teams for diversification purposes, it still operates as one asset management business.

The focus areas are:

– Core Strategies
– Fixed Income Strategies
– Unconstrained Strategies
– Frontier Strategies
– Beta Strategies

Why Factbook?

“With such a high number of funds on offer, we were experiencing some challenges collecting and collating data from various sources, including external data providers and internally from our portfolio administration databases. As a consequence turnaround times were not optimal and there were unnecessary strains on resources.

When Factbook first presented to us they illustrated some of their client requests and successes. It was evident that they had a deep understanding of the industry as a whole. They listened and understood what we were looking to achieve. The tools that they presented to us showed great flexibility, giving us confidence that both our short and long term goals could be met.

Factbook’s knowledge of and commitment to the South African market is beyond question and it was obvious to us that partnering with Factbook made sense, for both our business and our clients.”

(Technical Marketing and Product Management Head at Momentum Collective Investments)

Factbook Selected

“As a rule, before working with Factbook, the introduction of new systems and processes had tended to be complicated. The support we received during implementation and the training that we received surpassed my expectations.

As a consequence we were able to automate in only three months and improve the turnaround time, content and layout of our Momentum branded fund fact sheets considerably. The second phase of the project, which will deliver similar benefits to our third party clients falling under the MET license has just commenced.”

(Technical Marketing and Product Management Head at Momentum Collective Investments)

So what has changed?

As experts with data aggregation and transformation, Factbook’s first task was to take stock of the various data sources, utilising our plug-in technology meant this arduous task was achieved extremely quickly and allowed us to concentrate on the next challenges of turnaround time, content and layout. With the data input challenge completed, Factbook’s integrated workflow system took care of the turnaround times – fully automated factsheets are produced in seconds. Factbook’s integrated design surfaces meant the templating process went smoothly, allowing plenty of time to update the design and content as required by Momentum. As Momentum themselves said, “We are now able to distribute our Momentum branded fund factsheets in line with or earlier than the rest of the industry. This ensures that fund returns and positioning are more pertinent for investors.”

Karen Coleman, Director of Business Development at Factbook commented, “We are absolutely delighted to have successfully delivered our first South African implementation. What was called for was creative thinking and innovative solutions; which we delivered in partnership with the team at Momentum Collective Investments. This resulted in the best possible outcome for all stakeholders, with elements of existing process being successfully eliminated and both workload and risk being reduced.The first live production saw a large reduction in time to market as well as a marked improvement to layout, content and brand consistency across all outputs. All in all, we are very satisfied to have resolved a large number of issues for our client, resulting in an automated production base that can continue to be scaled and enhanced to the benefit of all concerned.”