Aegon Asset Management UK Ltd. has implemented Citadel Associates’ Cadis Data Management Platform (DMP). The Scotland-based investment management firm will use DMP in support of its outsourced securities administration and fund accounting functions, which are handled by Citigroup’s Global Transaction Services group, as well as for its own core business activities.
Cadis now supplies Aegon all data for the portfolio and trade order management process. This entails managing and enhancing corporate data from Icon, the accounting system currently in use at the investment firm, as well as information sourced from Bloomberg, FactSet, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank.
The implementation took under six months, following a selection process that evaluated five leading data solution products. Aegon says Cadis was selected based on its business-focussed user interface, ease of implementation, ability to build in phases, and fit with Aegon’s technical architecture.
Aegon took a phased approach to the implementation, which was undertaken by Aegon and Cadis staff. Phase I, completed in November, replaced Aegon’s front-office data infrastructure, across all asset classes.
Future phases will incorporate the performance area, other key transaction processing solutions and implementation of the Cadis Investment DataBlock (IDB) to support Aegon’s enterprise-wide reporting and analytics requirements. DataBlock is a database designed to store reference, historical portfolio, transactional and client data. In the future, Cadis will also be used to support and manage data to and from Citigroup’s Multifonds system, allowing seamless fund migration.
Aegon Asset Management UK manages around £39 billion on behalf of institutional, insured and retail-fund clients. It employs over 200 people at its Edinburgh head office. Other clients Citadel Associates include Russell/Mellon (Reference Data Review, April 2005), Newton and Insight Investments (Reference Data Review, August 2005). The vendor also recently added an interface to corporate actions announcements from London-based Exchange Data International (EDI) to the Cadis DMP (Reference Data Review, January 2006).
