Blackmore Capital, a Melbourne-based asset manager set up in 2018, and New York-based OTCfin have completed the integration of ESG factors with financial data for all Blackmore portfolios. By incorporating ESG factors into Blackmore’s investment process, OTCfin’s risk and regulatory reporting solution will help the asset manager’s team improve portfolio monitoring from both a financial and ESG perspective, and allow the firm to offer new ESG investment products to its clients.
Blackmore built its business from the ground up, initially applying for a licence and outsourcing IT to Microsoft. A due diligence exercise a couple of years later, discovered the need for a greater onus on governance and risk, and a review of regulatory reporting in line with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
Miles Bellman, chief operating officer at Blackmore Capital, says: “There were elements of our process that we needed to improve. We needed a technology uplift. In Australia there are two options, working with a large systems vendor, or a boutique strategist. We didn’t have the revenue to spend on large systems. We talked to a number of people working with OTCfin on a range of projects and chose to work with the company. It suits our temperament and means we can spend time on the business rather than on manual work.”
With help from OTCfin, Blackmore implemented a hosted version of the company’s PATOne EDM solution as a central data management system with connectivity to the Praemium custodian platform. It also moved from two Bloomberg contracts to five Refinitiv contracts for equity analysis and evaluation, replacing manual spreadsheet delivery of data with API feeds into the Refinitiv service. It also deployed MSCI risk and portfolio analysis tools.
Bellman says: “We are now looking to increase complexity and sophistication around what we do, and are working with OTCfin to build portfolio dashboards that will help us gain greater insight from our data. Combining dashboards with the data management platform provides a powerful solution from a portfolio perspective and gives clients more confidence in what we do.”
Having worked remotely with OCTfin to complete the PatOne implementation, automate processes, and move on to integrate ESG factors with financial data, Bellman says: “OTCFin has transformed and upgraded our approach to data automation, performance and ESG risk reporting. OTCFin’s integration into our business has delivered material improvements to our compliance procedures and removed a number of manual processes from our day-to-day operations. The OTCFin team is a pleasure to deal with and has become instrumental in helping us define future iterations of our data and ESG reporting objectives.”
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