Steve McGovern, Senior Manager, IMS Professional Services, speaks about the all important task of performance reporting to the various stakeholders of an investment operation - including Client Reporting. Steve then summarises what DST Global Solutions can do to solve many of these challenges with our Reporter Solution. (5:37)
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Transcript
Reporting has been a challenge for firms for many years in the asset management industry. DST has decided to really focus on that for two reasons, one; coming out of the latest financial issue, the market problems we've had in the last two years, the firms have to report well and often to their clients, so the communication is key. You can't over communicate, but you can communicate badly and that brings really to the second reason that this is an area where firms have not really looked at it in a way that we think makes sense. They’ve looked at it as a reporting issue where we see it as a business process issue.
Obviously that output is the final piece that matters but the business process part of the problem leading up to that is probably the key. Historically asset management firms have dealt with each type of report as a particular stream, so they gather the data needed, they have manual approval of review processes and then they produce the output often based on heroic efforts from their staff. We think what we really need to do is look at it as a process that needs to be managed and delivered holistically across the problem of client reporting.
I think many firms thought data warehousing would solve this problem for them but in my view, data warehouses really aren't designed for a reporting so they stop one step short of solving reporting problem. So they often do a great job of bringing together the data needed for reporting but they’re not really designed to assist with the output process. So we see data warehouses being a support for this effort but not really doing the management of the effort, the workflow and then ultimately filed delivery of those reports.
I think as a business process we need to tackle this issue by looking at the overall business process. The goal should be that you have a single process that delivers data for reporting and regardless of the medium of that delivery, the process is managed consistently. So whether it's the client's statements with heavy text or fund fact sheets that are very sophisticated, you really need to manage the process to deliver that. The view that we have is that you really should be gathering data once and using it many times.
We're very excited about Reporter because it gives us the tool that’s needed to really manage the whole process and so Reporter was built with asset managers – some of the leading firms and is really designed to manage both the gathering of the data, automating the approval process around that data including things like portfolio commentary and then ultimately the delivery of that data as finished output that really represents the kind of brand and image that you want or that firm wants to represent to their clients.
Reporter supports virtually every report type an asset manager needs, so client statements, prospectus’, investment pitch books - really anything you could imagine that you would want, even sales presentations from power point. Our belief in the platform is that we should gather the data once and then use it consistently across whatever the medium is. So if a picture of a portfolio manager needs to be updated that then is consistently used across all the outputs, even on web applications and of course most recently we’ve been hearing a lot about I-phone applications, so looking forward to that.
The goal is really to provide that consistent brand image for the client but also allow them to make the processes as efficient as possible. So quite honestly what we're excited about Reporter is, that we not only can service the broadest range of needs but we can also do it in a very cost effective way.
DST Global Solutions has really decided to focus on client reporting because we see that as one of the key issues that firms have to deal with in this environment. Clients are demanding and expecting that you’ll be reporting to them and you'll be completely transparent on a much more frequent basis across a much wider variety of mediums. So the current market turmoil has really led to heightened focus on that and that really brings us to the second reason, which is really that the client reporting has really not been done well in the past. It’s been focused on single outputs and they really haven't looked at it as a business process and we frankly think that this should be dealt with holistically as a business process rather than single outputs.
