Creating a robust on-boarding process for an investment management platform.
Client: Investment Bank
Outcome achieved: Increase client confidence in the onboarding process for the investment management platform
Budget: £100m
Practicus was engaged by a well-known and respected investment bank to support a £100m programme designed to bolster its investment management platform. Historically, the bank would provide middle and back office solutions to its clients using a number of different platforms, including outsourcing.
To gain a more flexible and robust offering a programme was launched to create centres of excellence around the world, allowing the bank to employ “follow the sun” methods, build world-class expertise from a single platform and reduce duplication of process by its workforce.
The key messages were ‘Global’, ‘Simple’ and ‘Scalable’ underpinned by an improvement in customer service. At a time when investment products are more complex and speed to market is a key driver, it was strategically sponsored at Main Board level to develop a simplified utility based platform for the on-boarding of several large, new clients.
This would mean migrating circa 900 funds on to a single, unified, in-house platform along with processes, reconciliations, accounting and investment accounting. A considerable undertaking with significant risks when you consider trade values in a single day can surpass £100m and legislation requires settlements to be completed the same day for cash and 3 days for securities.
The fines for a breach are substantial. With the importance of a successful platform cutover business critical, Practicus’s role was to create as near to a live environment as possible to ensure that when the full platform migration was made there was no chance of it falling over.
The Practicus team worked in two main areas. Firstly: producing a detailed cut-over plan and “model office” environment to ensure the dress rehearsals for migration produced an accurate view of what would happen. Secondly: training staff in process, workflow and cultural alignment to the overall mission. Practicus worked as part of a global team of circa 100 with a Practicus change practitioner responsible for the overall cut-over plan and model office. There were three dress rehearsals before ‘go live’ and it was these that gave the senior management the insight and confidence to order the full cut-over onto the new platform.
The Practicus Lead Practitioner was described as a ‘conductor’, with the whole team knowing exactly what was expected of them and when. We produced a detailed project plan for each weekend dress rehearsal down to minutes and hours, plugging in real live data captured from the previous week and identifying potential risks / bugs in the new platform technology.
This revision of the on-boarding processes prevented near certain breaches of cash settlements. There is without doubt a big difference between being ready on paper and being ready in the real world. It’s encouraging that the particular model office approach deployed for this programme is now the Investment Bank’s preferred method of preparing for ‘go live’ on change initiatives.
