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- Is there ever a ‘single version of the truth’ for investment reporting?
- Managing the leap from vendor selection to service provider relationship
- Investment reporting: sophistication doesn’t have to mean complexity
- Three ways to tell if your client reporting is at the heart of your client servicing.
- Mandatory vs discretionary documentation: a tale of two processes?
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Is there ever a ‘single version of the truth’ for investment reporting?
Is there such a thing as a single, reliable source of data for investment reporting, asks Abbey Shasore, CEO, Factbook. We hear much about ‘golden copy’ data within the investment management world. The term refers to a master version of security and reference data acting as a single authoritative source of truth for all the applications in the asset management IT landscape. A master source of data has an obvious appeal – it is always...
Managing the leap from vendor selection to service provider relationship
Having managed the ‘beauty parade’ and selected a vendor, what are the considerations for investment managers procuring new software products and services? How can the vendor best manage the handover from ‘wooing’ to delivering, asks Abbey Shasore, CEO, Factbook and Robert Corbally, founder, Hawser Consulting. When an investment management firm has concluded its vendor selection procedure and contracts have been signed, it may seem like a time to celebrate. Yet the end of what is...
Investment reporting: sophistication doesn’t have to mean complexity
Just because you are looking for more sophistication in your investment reporting, this doesn’t have to result in more complexity, writes Abbey Shasore, CEO, Factbook. The primary driver for most firms that are looking to upgrade their investment reporting is processes – it is taking far too long and there are very few controls in place. One remedy may be to investigate whether the data being used is correct. Unverified data certainly creates a major...
Three ways to tell if your client reporting is at the heart of your client servicing.
Is your client reporting merely a ‘box’ at the end of the investment lifecycle that requires a tick for completion? Or is it just one element in a much greater sphere of influence that includes client service, marketing, performance and even compliance? Is your reporting a two-way street – offering tools where clients can interrogate their data – where the focus is on engagement and not just delivery? Do you offer room for feedback in your...
Mandatory vs discretionary documentation: a tale of two processes?
What impact, if any, does the obligation around issuing documentation have on how they are produced within asset management firms? For example, are mandatory documents such as KIIDs (or KIDs) dealt with differently to discretionary documents such as factsheets? The co-existence of mandatory versus discretionary documentation within client reporting is an interesting one. Over many years working with blue-chip buy-side firms, it is not uncommon to see a divergence between functions...
The key to unlocking your golden source reporting data
Within the buy-side there is a strong argument for committing fund data into a single repository, fit for any purpose – but especially for investment reporting. In this way investment management firms can seamlessly improve the timeliness, volume and personalisation of their reporting outputs – whilst potentially also using less resource and mitigating risk. Many firms have highly paid analysts looking at spreadsheets of data from Bloomberg, S&P, Morningstar, external fund managers, fund accounting...
The ties that bind: merging your investment reporting operations
Any asset manager that has grown its AuM rapidly will know that its investment reporting processes can come under severe strain during that period. If mergers and acquisitions are added to the melting pot the situation becomes even more complex, often with multiple reporting processes or applications in play in various geographic centers, serving different client types with different expectations in different locations. The outcome can be a high degree of duplicated effort, inefficiencies, and...
Who pays the price for a delayed fund launch?
Summary: Asset managers have a problem with fund launches, because of the numerous stakeholders involved. The lack of governance is a problem for the asset manager because teams cannot easily identify the chokepoints in the process. The major issue with this situation is workflow. The complexity of fund launches is over complicated, involving multiple parties, and duplication of effort. The reputational damage from a fund launch delay, the costs of a service that is...
Is outsourcing client reporting still ‘losing control’?
In the world of financial technology, the maxim is always to look forward. In such a fast-paced environment, learning from the past is often seen as less important (or less exciting) than the ‘next big thing’, be it SaaS, IBOR, Big Data, blockchain, digitalisation or whatever the latest concept is. Sometimes, however, in business as in life, we need to look back to see how far we have come and to learn important lessons...
Video – Mitigating the risk of your client reporting implementation
There are a number of perils for any vendor going into a client reporting project on behalf of an asset management firm. One such problem area is what some in the industry call ‘data interfacing’ – handling data from external sources such as benchmark data vendors, third party administrators, other vendor systems (e.g. risk or performance applications) or various inhouse systems. There are three key reasons why this issue of interfacing with data sources is...
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