Enhancing Services and Reducing Risk with Standardised, Efficient Fund Administration Workflows
For an investment bank with trillions of dollars in assets under management, effective collaboration is key to managing risk and meeting key deadlines. To enhance efficiency and help ensure compliance across its global fund management activities, our customer uses the IBM Business Automation Workflow solution to support a standardised, integrated global operating model.
Imagining a Smarter Way of Working
As one of the world’s largest investment banks, our customer is always looking for innovative ways to enhance the quality of their services.
Delivering top-class hedge fund services is one of their key goals. They operate in a time-sensitive and heavily regulated space and it is extremely important that all their global teams can work together in a coordinated and controlled way.
In the past, each of their hedge fund administration teams relied on different processes to drive their day-to-day activities, supported by location-specific systems. Because they didn’t have one global workflow to manage trades and the associated correspondence, it was difficult to identify where each work item was in the lifecycle at any given time. As a result, their teams had less efficient means of retrieving requisite information.
To solve the challenges, they decided to deploy a global operating model to support investor relations hedge fund management across the organisation.
Shaping Integrated, Standardised Workflows
Working with Insight 2 Value, the bank consolidated investor relations management systems into a central hub, supported by the IBM Business Automation Workflow solution.
“IBM Business Automation Workflow stood apart from the other solutions we evaluated, as it offered us the most flexibility to adapt workflows to our specific operational requirements. It was also very straightforward to integrate the IBM solution with third-party applications, which gave us confidence that Business Automation Workflow could support our business for years to come.”
Expert consultants from Insight 2 Value supported the bank throughout the implementation and helped customise the solution to the bank’s requirements. To eliminate manual processes and reduce the risk of human error, Insight 2 Value built digital templates for key forms and checklists using decision-tree logic to facilitate a user’s process steps. Insight 2 Value also helped the bank integrate Business Automation Workflow software with its in-house share registration system, enabling it to manage its end-to-end processes using only two systems.
With a customised application configuration tool, created by Insight 2 Value, the bank can make future configuration changes independently. We also built tailored dashboards to help senior decision-makers track the progress of every work item across all of their hedge fund services systems and deliver visibility of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as timeliness and resource allocation.
Delivering High-Quality Services
By enabling its global teams to work together more effectively, the Bank is boosting the efficiency and transparency of its core investor relations workflows — helping it deliver controlled, high-quality services.
One of the team commented: “Thanks to IBM Business Automation Workflow, we’ve greatly improved visibility across our hedge fund administration workflows. For example, managers can track the status of each work item as it moves between different teams, see when teams have interacted with a task, and when two or more teams are working on a task in parallel. This improved transparency makes it easier for us to prepare detailed regulatory reports, which in turn reduces the time and resources we need to assign to an audit.”
With Insight 2 Value’s prebuilt dashboards, the bank can gain timely insights into KPIs such as “average time taken to complete” at the touch of a button. This information helps the company ensure it is always meeting its quality-of-service objectives.
“Adopting integrated, automated business workflows has helped us to improve our efficiency and accelerate key processes, contributing to a more responsive, higher-quality experience.”
