How transforming the front office can build a platform for growth

Like many large financial services organizations, a leading asset manager faced a number of pressing challenges such as globalization, digitization, and industry trends including pressure to lower fees, passive investments and sustainable products.

Over several years, EY has executed an end-to-end technology transformation for the asset manager, from helping to select and implement the most appropriate front-office platforms to supporting change management in the organization.

At the heart of the transformation project was EY’s experience with a leading front-office investment management platform that offered the ideal solution for the client’s equity trading platform and its compliance issues. EY had made a strategic investment in these skills and had individuals with experience with as many as 20 implementations of the platform.

“We started building this specific competency within our technology consulting practice six years ago,” said Anil Kant, Managing Director, Wealth and Asset Management Technology. “That’s what helped us put together a great team on the ground, which worked with the client for several years to support the transformation. We carried out the entire remapping of the client’s data model to map directly to this investment management platform, and did the same for compliance, recording all of their investment rules from various legacy systems to one instance.”

The EY team also developed a number of technological innovations in the course of the transformation program that has since been deployed more widely in the asset management industry in areas including robotic process automation for rule coding, agile sprint reporting, effort estimation and workflow, and trade-mode testing.

A multidisciplinary team

But beyond IT, this was a truly multidisciplinary effort by EY, with staff from nine different practices and multiple service delivery centers working on the project. Apart from technology specialists, the team included business analysts from the Consulting practice, who gathered information on the client’s requirements, and change management professionals from the People Advisory Services practice, who helped to drive the program and manage its impact on the various stakeholders within the organization.

Moreover, because the asset manager needed key members of its own investment operations team (among others) to dedicate significant amounts of time to the transformation program, EY staff performed their roles and helped ensure the day-to-day work of the organization did not suffer.

As a result of the transformation program, the asset manager’s multiple legacy compliance engines and order management systems have been decommissioned, replaced in each case by a single platform. This simplification has resulted in significant cost savings and efficiency gains.

This increased operational efficiency has, in turn, had a beneficial effect on profitability. For example, thanks to the modernization of the investment management platforms, various funds can now be managed on a single platform across different lines of business and legal entities smoothly, without technology getting in the way. Portfolio managers now have access to better data and new ways of using it to inform their decision-making.

The new order management solutions also enable the scalability of the organization’s business and give it greater flexibility to support new products and investment vehicles across all its lines of business. For example, the asset manager is planning to launch a major new product, for which EY helped lay the foundation, over the next few years.

Kant sums up the impact of the transformation program: “We implemented a technology solution that drove real business value. It enabled the client to access new markets and thoughtfully grow the business. This wasn’t just a technology project.”