The Investment Research Partnership

Consultancy Case Study 1

International WEB site development for a Dublin based fund management company.

Summary

A major Life and Pensions company with a ‘fund of funds’ management approach, had setup it’s own off shore fund management division with a mandate of recruiting investment managers to manage specific funds This was a ‘manager of managers’ approach rather than a ‘manager of funds’ approach with which they were familiar.

The need was to develop a method of how these funds could be marketed globally through existing distribution channels. The key to this was via an international web site.

Client's Business

The manager of managers approach was relatively new in Europe but had been in existence in the USA for number of years. Here the fund manager contracted one of the best investment managers’ in a particular sector to manage a fund for the fund manager.

This allowed the fund manager to replace the investment manager if the performance did not meet with expectations or peer group managers. This could be done with little disruption to the fund and gave added marketing value to the fund manager’s client knowing they would always be with a top performing fund manager.

Critical Client Issues

The objective for which we were asked to use our expertise was in how to get this new company into the public domain with appropriate marketing literature via a web site which could be accessed from any where in the world but take into account the following key criteria:-

Language (7)

Currency (4)

Local compliance (multiple)

Content consistency across all sites

Automation of as many processes as possible

Management record keeping of all documents produced on the web site.

Content issues included:-

Data input from a variety of sources in a variety of formats

Data library for client and compliance purposes

Daily pricing

Develop and train company personnel to manage on a day to day basis.

Develop a site which will differentiate from other investment managers

Fact sheet design which is consistent across all markets (including Cantonese and Japanese)

Page design which is consistent across all sites.

Our response to this proposal

The design was broken down in 5 stages of development. Time was a critical issue (6 months from initial brief to first site) with the remaining sites and features being rolled out over the following 6 to 12 months. We were asked to design, build and train company staff for the web site with all these factors considered and having gained comment and a needs analysis from a number of potential users in 3 continents. This included face to face meetings in a number of client office localities.

A key part of the brief was to have the fact sheets updated on a monthly basis in the shortest possible time having been through marketing and compliance sign off. Traditionally, this would take 20 to 25 business days. The aim was to do this in 10 business days. The key to this was to automate the process with as much data as possible coming from a number of data feeds and from a number of different sources and then integrate them into one master data base and from this produce finished printer quality documents or HTML pages. This avoided errors, re-keying and minimised staff requirements.

The process also had a management system built in which allowed all pages, updates and new pages, wherever they were in the system, to be monitored and recorded throughout the production process with changes, modifications, etc., regardless of whether they were made by the designer, administrator and/or sign off manager.

A multi-tiered site was developed which had as it’s central key, a global site, which could be viewed by anyone at outset but would be restricted as new sites came on line. The first language was English with Spanish following soon after. All initial reports were in the base currency of the funds. Compliance was based on the fund domicile country (Ireland) rules.

This initial site contained company details, manager of manager structure, fact sheets, fund prospectus to view and print, fund manager details, prices and asset allocation, fund ‘style’ graphics, world market news and company news. Output was restricted to HTML and PDF at this stage.

The project also required a need to get to contract and implementation stage:-

Internal/external IT resources for development

Internal/external IT resources for support and future development

review and contract outside data suppliers

review and contract internal data suppliers (this includes company administration services)

Multiple data input and output formats (including video)

Longer term requirements also required secure client reporting and client dealing.

Client Results/Benefits

The project took 3 months to initiate and plan and was rolled out over the following 6 months. An external IT company with extensive database management knowledge and industry skills were recruited to manage and develop the central database. This was critical to project as the programmers needed to have detailed understanding of the clients marketplace and requirements. There was not enough time to develop a database internally from scratch.

To this was added a client management system which controlled and monitored the functions on a daily basis and allowed control of the system from multiple locations. This allowed the web director to control the site from any location around the world. This also meant that any national holidays, staff illness and/or crisis control was extremely flexible and control could be transferred instantly to another person or location.

The web site was development was handled internally along side the client management system. Both systems required local user input and, to some extent control, so any system used had to be client network compatible.

As the company was a small part of a global operation, with small teams of administration, sales and IT staff, additional IT resources could be bought in on an hourly basis from the company’s central IT division when needed.

Within 18 months from the initial contact, the fund management company had a global web site which had 6 sub sites on 3 continents. The process was automated as designed and the average fact sheet updating was 11 days. The systems all worked as designed.

The site was brought in on time and within budget.

3 years on, the site has not fundamentally changed in structure and has only had cosmetic changes to the site design. There are now proposals to use the site design, concept and procedures on a wider basis within the group as a whole to reduce costs and improve the time to site production of factsheets.

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