In the last ten years, the business strategy of most investment managers has become more diversified and the investment strategies more sophisticated. The existing technology and operating models that support these changing strategies have become restrictive. These restrictions often result in the need for technology and operational change.

ReformIS has many years of experience in implementing leading front office vendor products and developing bespoke solutions. In working with our ever increasing client base, which includes large, medium and small asset managers and hedge funds, ReformIS has supplied specialist teams of analysts, developers and project management consultants to facilitate all aspects of solutions engineering within the front office; these include:

• Business Strategy Consolidation and Definition
• Technology and Operational Strategy Definition
• Business Process Clarification and Reengineering
• System Selection and Development Services
• Project Management and Implementation

The ReformIS Front Office consultancy team are dedicated to helping investment management companies remove the constraints that prohibit change in an industry which continues to evolve.

ReformIS consultants are experienced in working with investment management data and all the challenges that accompany its management. We have extensive data modelling expertise and have led projects to implement large scale financial data management solutions such as Cadis EDM, Eagle PACE™ and GoldenSource©.

Data Strategy and Data Management is central to investment management and can either be a powerful enabler for business operations or, if done badly, a significant barrier to growth. ReformIS understand the importance of good data and the challenges faced by data projects, such as:

• Centralising disparate positions data: business requirements may originate from the need to report accurate AuM figures, providing trading systems with start of day positions or obtaining a “golden copy” prior to distribution to downstream systems. It is important to distinguish between requirements for supporting operational process and those to support senior-level decision making.
• Security Master: this is an operational requirement to provide unique security identification across a multi-centre organisation.
• Efficient data dissemination: data management is not just about data storage. Communication between internal and external parties is becoming more and more streamlined, and tools such as FpML enable a common data definition. ReformIS has helped its clients develop standard xml schemas for instruments, positions and transactions covering all asset classes.

ReformIS has helped clients meet many of the challenges above and can provide clarity and the analytical skills necessary to ensure that the real business needs are met.

ReformIS has successfully delivered solutions to the investment management sector to meet requirements for accurate and efficient internal, regulatory and client reporting. These forms of reporting generally require fixed-format reports to meet a specific, regular requirement for data, rather than meeting the requirement of ad hoc reporting and data mining generally served by data warehousing and business intelligence initiatives.

Solutions for this need require consultants with both an understanding of the business requirement and the ability to visualise the necessary processes and technologies to turn it into a reality, whether a bespoke or packaged solution is chosen.

ReformIS consultants have helped our clients to:

• Build efficient reporting systems to meet regulatory requirements within very challenging timescales
• Implement efficient client reporting systems owned by the business, not IT
• Analyse and improve process for internal reporting of AuM and new business figures

Our success comes not only from our strong analytical skills, but also our efficient project management, crucial in meeting complicated reporting requirements against fixed timelines.

Business intelligence is concerned with enabling organisations to make timely, relevant decisions based upon the information held within their data. Often that data exists in multiple forms, within multiple systems, serving specific business functions. It is the objective of a business intelligence initiative to consolidate all decision-making data into a form that enables new analysis and insights into the organisation’s data and rapid retrieval of that information.

Within investment management organisations, reporting is often hampered by the number of different data sources, a reliance upon non-strategic data sources, as well as a lack of client information. For example, for client reporting projects our experience has shown that there is often an over-reliance on finance departments who can typically access data only for managed clients (under Investment Management Agreements) and those who are invoiced.

The rise of Enterprise Data Management within the asset management industry has gone some way in consolidating organisational data and is often an enabler to business intelligence initiatives. However, data hubs of this type are traditionally architected for transactional processing and do not readily give up the data analyses and data mining capabilities required for management information reporting. Therefore, business intelligence and data warehousing skills remain critical to unlocking the true potential of an organisation’s data.

ReformIS have successfully implemented business intelligence and data warehousing solutions in a number of well known investment management companies across a variety of subject areas. We understand the challenges for asset managers and hedge funds employing business intelligence in areas such as sales, marketing, distribution and executive reporting. ReformIS consultants can determine strategy, design solutions and advise on optimum data architecture to facilitate internal management information provision. Our expertise in business intelligence initiatives aligned with our experience in the field of data management, provides ReformIS with a powerful strategic insight into client needs.