Graeme Condie explores how firms being faced with a multitude of analytic engines can use these analytics in a complementary and collaborative manner. This ensures all stakeholders within the organisation have all the information they need at their fingertips to drive the business and make informed decisions.
Asset managers and owners today produce large quantities and broad spectrums of analytical information to power their businesses. These analytics are used for many reasons, whether it is to aid decision making, provide insight into the past or to communicate with clients and stakeholders. Analytics, in the right form, are very powerful – enabling achievement of the ultimate objectives of winning new business, meeting investment targets and increasing assets under management.
Over the past decade the focus has been on best of breed analytical engines to satisfy specific requirements for asset classes, strategies and geographies. This has resulted in asset managers renting, owning or subscribing to various systems, services or engines, whether they are outsourced, built in-house, installed vendor software or supplied by service providers. While these individual solutions are meeting defined business requirements on a stand-alone basis, the question becomes, “Are they complementing one another or does the multiplicity of these facilities increase business complexity and risk?” It could be argued that this drive towards best of breed has resulted in collateral damage in the form of a new data management challenge.
More recently, the industry has been focused on solving one key segment of the data management challenge - specifically around creating consistent and complete reference data which can be distributed throughout the organisation, ensuring all processes, systems and people are working from the same starting point. However, this new analytical data management approach could prove to be just as challenging.
At DST Global Solutions we are in the privileged position of being at the core of our 260+ investment management clients’ operations worldwide. We have built up our client community over a period of 30 years and this gives us a unique perspective of the issues they face and a unique opportunity to help them meet those challenges. This specific challenge has been posed to us from many quarters, from stakeholders such as the CIO, CFO, Head of Performance & Risk, Fund Managers through to Relationship Managers and Marketing. Our accumulated knowledge and experience has lead us to an answer that will meet this challenge. Our solution recognises that today’s asset manager has many complex analytical engines powering their business and will thrive in this environment. Our solution is a system agnostic approach which will deliver the information required by each stakeholder in their business environment. It will deliver the right analytics, in the required format at the right time.
