Case Studies

Asset Management: Case Study

Assistance in the centralisation of an operational structure in the securities services


The Issue

To more efficiently cope with its increasing business activities, our client decided to centralise its IT infrastructure and parts of its operational department. The intervention of PricewaterhouseCoopers was needed mainly to:

  • Assist and manage the externalisation of the TA activity to an owned third party company;
  • Assure the migration of its IT platform dealing with custodian activity and fund accounting;
  • Assure change management related to the above-mentioned activities;
  • Rewrite the custodian and fund administration manuals completely.

Our Approach

PricewaterhouseCoopers provided the client with a team of IM professionals for each functional part of the project: Transfer agency, Custody and Fund administration. The three teams worked in a collaborative manner to assess the issues that impacted on the organisation transversally as for example with cash management which is covered in the custody, fund accounting and Transfer agency streams.

In each stream, the teams’ approach focused on identifying the changes that needed to be made to the operational model. When the future model was defined, the new processes were implemented and communicated to the whole organization.

Specific points have been addressed in each of the three fields including:

  • Legal requirement analysis and implementation (new contracts, SLA’s);
  • Change management with the operational end users;
  • IT migration set up and planning;
  • Post implementation follow-up;
  • Post-migration issue follow-up including the setting up of a dedicated reconciliation team;
  • Implementation of centralised pricing and master file department for Fund accounting.

 

Client Benefit

The most important outcome for the client was the consolidation of its operations department and the processes used therein. This has reduced the company’s time to market and provided flexibility for future business changes.

These organisational changes were completed within a relatively short time frame (6 months) much to the delight of the client who was then able to build on the changes proposed rather quickly.