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.