Representative Engagements
Derivatives Systems Product Review
InvestTech conducted research on multiple products and compared the functional capabilities in numerous categories including Market and Reference Data, Compliance, Risk, Back-office and Accounting, Reporting, Technology and the future direction for each of the products.
Integrated Accounting, Performance Measurement,
Data Management and Reporting Project
The client, a $50 billion mutual fund and institutional asset manager, had outgrown their portfolio accounting platform, which, among other deficiencies, lacked multicurrency support. Over the years the client had implemented a number of MS Excel-based workarounds to address functional gaps which increased the operational risk profile of the firm. Their in-house developed data warehouse was a highly customized and integrated solution that evolved to supplement the core investment application systems. Altogether, these processes were not scalable, lead to duplicate data validation efforts and left little time for value-added investment, operations and compliance activities.
Large Data Strategy Project
InvestTech was engaged by a $120 billion public pension plan to conduct a strategic data architecture assessment project to help design the future state enterprise data strategy and execution road-map to support the business growth requirements over the next 5-10 years. InvestTech was also selected to define the firm-wide requirements for reference data and completed a RFP for distribution to the reference data vendor. This process included the requirements for complex derivatives and risk data management.
Multi-Product Integration
InvestTech was engaged by a $15 billion asset manager to integrate Thomson’s PORTIA, Bloomberg POMS and Wall Street Office. The client selected Wall Street Office for their loan book of business while continuing to use PORTIA for their high yield fixed income asset class business. Since the clients’ portfolio asset mix spawned multiple security types, integration was required from Bloomberg POMS to Wall Street Office for the fixed income transactions and from Wall Street Office to PORTIA for the loans.
OMS Trading System Implementation
A $60 billion public pension fund engaged InvestTech to assist with the evaluation and selection of a trade order management system and to provide best practice advice in the OMS space, as well as to provide advice on operational efficiencies by the use of industry utilities to settle and communicate trade data. The project included the implementation of Charles River’s CRIMS system and Bloomberg’s POMS system. InvestTech also assisted with the selection and implementation of a trade aggregator product and the implementation of the Omgeo suite of products including Oasys, Alert and TradeMatch. In addition, InvestTech provided expertise in designing and developing data interfaces in order for these and other applications to share data in a seamlessly integrated method.
Outsource Service Supplier
A $30B international equity manager that found their investment operations staff growing at a faster rate than their AUM and revenues engaged InvestTech to identify a list of potential outsource service suppliers to provide post-trade execution services. The primary driver behind outsourcing was the settlement complexity of the foreign equity component of their portfolios. This led to inadequate corporate action data, the need to multi-source reference data and significant reconciliation and cash management issues.
Private Equity System Selection
A large mid-western pension plan engaged InvestTech to lead a vendor evaluation and selection for a private equity system. At the time of the engagement, the pension plan was using an outsource service to track their $1.75B private equity portfolio, which consisted of twenty-two funds represented by fifteen relationships. The client’s current and forecasted level of investment activity, along with the need to monitor the portfolio of funds and the underlying activity, such as deal flow, cash flows, geographical and sector exposure, was essential. The desired solution needed to address greater transparency of the holdings, seamless integration with other assets managed in the plan and quicker, more reliable reporting and performance measurement capabilities.
Risk Data Analysis
A Pension Plan, with assets under management exceeding $160 billion, wanted to identify gaps in Terms and Conditions that were being captured for Risk Management Reporting. There was loss of confidence in the data and calculations being reported for overall firm-wide exposure to credit, interest rate and other risks that impacted Risk Management decisions. The security universe in scope was complex in nature and included many OTC and non-OTC derivatives.