The Opportunity
The company, a leading Singapore asset manager, faced challenges with the largest digital transformation project in the firms history. The project was to completely revamp and modernize their entire front to back systems, processes and operations. In addition, the firm wanted to build out a new data and analytics reporting infrastructure on the back of their new integrated IBOR system.
After embarking on their implementation journey, the project got off to a rocky start with progress starting to stagnate, costs beginning to overrun, and milestones being delayed.
Engagement Approach
The company engaged FINARCH team to help them navigate their digital transformation journey and to provide expert support on several of the key workstreams which had challenges. As the timelines were already stretched, the FINARCH team provided a global ‘follow the sun’ approach to optimize delivery speed, and assisted with several of the key workstreams including testing and validation, data migration, and data integration for corprorate actions and reconciliations.
Configuration Validation & Advisory:
The FINARCH team helped to validate the vendor configuration, to ensure it met client specifications, industry standards and best practices and provided the client with training and best practices on using the new Target ecosystem.
Testing and Validation
The FINARCH team led the testing, defect management, and release management workstreams. We followed an AGILE approach, with daily meetings and testing across two timezones to meet the projects ambitious timelines. We utilized our knowledge of the target system and investment operations to reduce false-positive defects, and save time and costs on having the limited vendor resources provided fixes.
Data Integration
The FINARCH team was deployed to refactor interfaces between the FactSet (Performance) , the order management/execution platform and some of the other systems used within the clients ecosystem.
Reporting Transformation
Complementing and integrated with the ABOR and IBOR system, a new cloud-based Reporting architecture was implemented which utilized Snowflake for cloud infrastructure, and Qlik and PowerBI for end-user reporting and visualization.
The Impact
The project successfully went live and began to pay dividends to the organization immediately. Operations which were manually performed using spreadsheets or end-user-computing processes and workflows were eliminated, reducing costly errors and saving time. Reporting capabilities and insight were immediately beneficial to end users, who leveraged these analytics to make better investment and operational decision making.
Most importantly, the firm now had a scalable, cloud-based ecosystem where they could rapidly respond to market conditions, launch new products, and increase their AUM.
