Swiss private bank and asset manager Bank Vontobel has implemented Princeton Financial Systems’ DVS Fund Warehouse to store investment fund master data and valuation data, and deliver improved reporting to customers. The bank has also added the DVS Ratio Calculation Engine to calculate ratios when preparing key investor information documents.
Princeton, a New Jersey-based provider of financial solutions for global institutional investors, won the Bank Vontobel contract in a competitive tender after the bank decided to move on from a vendor database solution built with Visual Basic 6, a technology that is no longer widely supported in the market. Instead, it chose Princeton’s DVS Fund Warehouse that is built on an Oracle database using the .Net programming language.
Markus Diener, head of IT at Bank Vontobel, explains: “We decided in favour of Princeton Financial Systems because we were looking for a market tested solution. Of all the systems we analysed, DVS Fund Warehouse was best able to meet our requirements. At the same time, the professional preparation of our data and the optimisation of our processes allows us to increase the level of service we provide to our customers.”
The data warehouse went live in early August 2011, automating the collation of information from sources such as funds accounting, portfolio management and market data feeds, and exporting information in a standardised format for analytical reporting and portfolio reports.
Marc Breitenbach, managing director of Princeton’s Swiss subsidiary, says: “The benefits of DVS Fund Warehouse include efficient data storage, the ability to make modifications to the system quickly and access to the central data warehouse from several bank locations. It also provides better quality reports than were previously possible.”
This is Princeton’s first encounter with Bank Vontobel, but it is no stranger to Swiss investment firms with local customers of the data warehouse including Swiss & Global, Cantor Fitzgerald and Clariden Leu.
Princeton’s presence and strength in Switzerland results from its acquisition of Aquin Components, a German company with subsidiaries in Zurich, London and Paris, in October 2008. Aquin, initially a consultancy and later a solutions provider, developed DVS Fund Warehouse as well as the MIG21 investment compliance solution and its complementary local compliance LawCards that have made their mark in Europe and are beginning to be offered by Princeton to its global customer base.
