From A-Team Insights:
NeoXam has signed up the asset servicing banking group of Crédit Agricole, CACEIS, as the first user of the third edition of its Impress investment reporting solution, Regulatory Edition. The solution supports digital production of quarterly, semi-annual and annual reports. It is based on NeoXam’s buy-side DataHub and uses the functionality of the data repository to establish workflows, collect, validate and control data, check data quality, and populate report templates. Automation provides fast turnaround and flexibility a means for Impress users to customise presentation and personalise reports.
Facing increasingly complex regulation on the buy-side, including the reporting requirements of PRIIPs, UCITs and IFRS 9, and needing to produce over 10,000 annual and semi-annual reports, CACEIS decided to replace an existing, but failing, vendor solution with NeoXam Impress Regulatory Edition. The reports produced by CACEIS are for different business lines in a dozen jurisdictions and can run up to 250 pages with over 30 contributors and a requirement to publish in four or five different languages. With just three to six weeks to prepare regulatory reports, automation is key.
Ramy El Houayek, global head of operations fund services at CACEIS, says: “When it came to winning new business, the ability to provide our clients with tailor-made reports became a huge crunch point. We investigated several reporting solutions, but none offered NeoXam Impress’s level of customisation as well as automation. So, we turned to NeoXam to provide a solution that is agile, not only when it comes to responding quickly to regulatory demands, but also in providing each new client with a personalised and detailed report.”
Impress is based on NeoXam’s view, and that of the industry, that the future of reporting will be digital, with firms being able to provide interactive reports for clients while meeting regulatory reporting deadlines. Didier Roubinet, chief strategy officer at NeoXam, says: “Today, reports are printed, but we know they will become digital, not just PDFs, but digital reports with the capability to click on elements and find more detail. For example, it could be possible to click on the CEO introduction to an annual report and watch a video containing more or less information. We are prepared to do this and have the technology to make reports much more interactive.”
While CACEIS is the first user of the Regulatory Edition of Impress, the first and second editions – Digital Edition and Client Edition – are already up and running with a number of customers. Digital Edition reinvents the client experience for asset management companies by providing real-time portfolio performance calculations that can be shared with end users, bank clients, asset managers and client-facing sales executives. Roubinet says: “Performance calculations are usually presented as PDFs, which is very static. Digital Edition has a real-time focus and includes smart calculations and lots of automated controls to provide evaluations on demand.”
The Client Edition of Impress is designed to ease the burden of regulatory requirements to publish and distribute fund fact sheets once a month. The solution can produce calculations at any time and moves beyond fixed templates for particular types of funds to allow clients to create their own templates. The combination of data management and automation can produce up to 20,000 fund fact sheets in an hour. Roubinet comments: “Asset managers use fund fact sheets to display their brand and performance in the market. Impress allows them to differentiate by giving them the ability to change the data model and workflow of fund fact sheets, and make performance calculations at any time.”
NeoXam Impress software can be used either on premise or in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. A Microsoft Azure version is coming soon.
