Jeremy Skaling, Head of Product Management
Recently I participated on a panel at an industry event where the group was asked to comment on common pitfalls with data management projects. I identified three key challenges that firms face:
By Richard Mailhos, Product Manager, Eagle Investment Systems
What is the exposure of your investment portfolio? Is it the daily priced market value of each position in your portfolio? Or is it the total economic exposure of all positions? Economic exposure is the notional market value of all positions, providing a more accurate picture of leverage in a portfolio. Notional values are often ignored or simply not supported by most custodians and accounting systems. At Eagle, we produce notional values through our enrichment engine as a value-add to accounting processes. Here we list some key reasons you may be missing the full picture if you aren’t looking at notional market value:
Steve O’Loughlin, Product Manager, Investment Accounting
In an ideal world having up-to-date tax information for a portfolio, whether it a mutual fund or a taxable retail brokerage account, is desirable for tax planning decision making and planning purposes. However, embedding tax accounting in high volume real-time processing is a daunting challenge. Adding to the challenge, aggregating and storing all tax data in a real-time environment is simply not viable or practical. Therefore, making intelligent decisions about which types of tax data are available for real-time processing is critical and should be evaluated based upon the needs of individual clients.
John Lehner, President and CEO Eagle Investment Systems
As your business has evolved over the past several years, so, too, has ours. We realize that unexpected changes, challenges and opportunities have become the norm in the new frontier of the financial services industry and we are committed to helping our clients navigate unfamiliar territory. Eagle Investment Systems strives to be more than just a solutions provider—we view ourselves an extension of our clients. In keeping with our commitment to help clients stay at the forefront of industry changes, we have offered up a variety of information to our clients and industry peers to keep you informed on issues of interest in our industry. We hope that you have found value in our events, white papers, videos, webinars and quarterly Eagle Insight newsletter. In hopes of providing you with the most timely and useful content possible, we are proud to now launch the Eagle Exchange, our industry blog.
Mal Cullen, Head of the Americas and Eagle ACCESS℠
The rise of cloud computing adoption in the financial services industry has caused a shift in the risks that investment managers must manage. These risks are quickly evolving and difficult to keep abreast of without specialized staff. At Eagle, we realized that it’s no longer enough for us to align with our clients as financial services and software specialists; we must also be information security and risk specialists. Investment managers often focus on cost-efficiency and streamlined processes when assessing their cloud providers, but security and risk management should be stressed equally. It came as no surprise to us that in a recent Eagle client survey, more than 75% of asset managers plan to increase risk management expenditures over the next 1-2 years.
Steve O’Loughlin, Product Manager, Investment Accounting
Are you feeling the pressure to shorten monthly reporting timeframes? If you are like many fund companies, you are looking to improve operational efficiencies but face the task of producing timely information without introducing the operational risk of data inaccuracies. For US mutual funds, daily net asset values are calculated on trade date +1 (T+1) and the industry generally accepts that a fund’s portfolio data is not current on any given business day. However, this is not true for monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual reporting periods. In month-end reporting, trades that occur on month-end are required to be included in month-end reporting. We’ve seen a wide range of solutions aimed at addressing this issue—from manual workarounds to entire subsystems.
Jeremy Skaling, Head of Product Management
If you find yourself glued to a smart phone or tablet, you are not alone. Last year, mobile data spending outpaced voice expenditures for the first time. If the general population is consuming most data via mobile devices, it’s naturally where individuals will gravitate to monitor investment data. In anticipation of this shift, we have made strides in bringing investment management software to your fingertips. Last year, we started working with MicroStrategy® Incorporated to integrate the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform™ with Eagle’s portfolio management solution. With this collaboration, Eagle clients will be able to access highly visual dashboards and portfolio data on the web, on mobile devices, or via Microsoft Office applications to perform portfolio analytics and in-depth risk and performance analyses.
Diane McLoughlin, Head of Client Relationship Management
Industry changes have reoriented our clients’ businesses and we have altered the way we serve our clients in response. Eagle’s Global Client Coverage Model organizes client touch points into three key roles: the relationship manager, the project executive and the client operations manager. Eagle’s relationship manager is committed to aligning overall business objectives with the capabilities of the Eagle solution. The relationship manager has end-to-end accountability of the relationship throughout the client lifecycle and helps to ensure alignment of short, intermediate and long-term goals. The client operations manager is the main point of contact for technical support on a 24/7 basis and the project executive oversees implementation activities. The project executive is dedicated to helping the client successfully deploy the solution while helping to ensure benefits by using our best practices.
Mal Cullen, Head of the Americas and Eagle ACCESS℠
Do you need help identifying the key elements that lead to informed decisions on middle-office technology? Look no further. We break it down into three areas to consider when upgrading your technology solutions.
