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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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Software providers face ESG re-boot
The tech industry’s reliance on offshore software developers – some of them working in “dimly-lit third world offices” – could become an ESG issue for fund managers who buy their services, says Abbey Shasore, chief executive of Factbook. A dam bursting in South America, killing hundreds and flattening communities, will trigger a wave of ESG protest at funds investing in the dam’s owners. ESG is a cultural phenomenon creating derision for asset managers investing...
Client reporting and the short road to anarchy
A topic that attracts much discussion in technology circles – and one of the early questions that we, as vendors, are often posed by prospective clients - is: ‘Which development methodology do you follow?’ The two most popular approaches - ‘Waterfall’ and ‘Agile’ - are well-known, mature practices. Waterfall follows a linear approach to software development. With waterfall, the vendor will analyse, design, build and test before delivering the entire system. Some firms believe that...
Think you’re ready to automate your client reports?
Technology has been recognised as a vital enabler within the client reporting process, but are you really ready for automation, writes Marc Dukes, Client Services Director at investment reporting specialist Factbook. As investment managers scale, their businesses become more complex and their clients more diverse, the need to speed up the production and delivery of client reports becomes a critical step. It may sound over-simplistic, perhaps even trite, but investment managers must be clear...
Employing your ‘sixth sense’ in systems selection
In the asset management world, there are many factors involved in the systems selection process and most of these have been well documented by procurement experts around the globe. At a basic level, the decision between an enterprise or best-of breed approach to technology needs to be addressed, followed by a review of the functionality on offer from the various relevant vendors. Some considerations, however, transcend all approaches and these are often overlooked...
Five situations when you should request a Proof of Concept
Any major IT project on behalf of an asset management firm is fraught with risk. Client, market, jurisdictional, regulatory and technological changes can all derail a perfectly planned technology roll-out in asset management and the IT highway is literally strewn with abandoned, over-budget and overdue systems failures. One way of mitigating that risk is the Proof of Concept (PoC). A PoC is a limited-scale deployment of a software system within an...
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...
Days are numbered for quarterly client reporting.
I read with interest the FT’s recent article ‘The long and short of the quarterly reports controversy’ (Owen Walker, Monday July 2, 2018). The article reflects on how Paul Polman, on his first day as chief executive of Unilever in 2009, bravely ditched the FTSE 100 company’s quarterly earnings reports and with it all the other short term-focused KPIs normally included. Polman’s argument, in short, was that for a firm focused...
7 Reasons Why Producing Factsheets Yourself Never Works Out The Way You Plan
You underestimate the workload If you only have a few funds, you may be thinking “how difficult can it be to produce 2 pages of copy text, with a few graphs, a few tables and some performance figures…”. So, let’s break this down further to see exactly what will be needed to produce this “simple” two-page document. Say you have 10 funds, each...
10 Signs You Should Invest in Automated Financial Reporting Technology
It is all too easy to continue with inefficient or poor reporting practices just because you ‘have always done it this way’. Take a look at the following tell-tale signs. Are any of the following sounding familiar? If, so, now is the time you need to invest in technology. 1. Your reporting cycle seems to finish just before it all starts again. Many firms operate a reporting cycle that takes almost the entire...
PRIIPs implementation pushed by 12 months.
Following a debate, The European Commission (EC) has confirmed the date for its PRIIPs regulations will be pushed to January 2018. The Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (PRIIPs) legislation was due to come into force on 31 December 2016. Early indicators were there: in September the European Parliament (EP) rejected the regulatory technical standards (RTS) governing PRIIPs Key Information Documents (KIDs). With the College of Commissioners voting to delay the implementation, the Commission...
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