About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Andrew’s Blog – MoneyMate Hopes to Capitalise on Fund Data Distribution Challenge

Subscribe to our newsletter

With a newly rebranded fund data management product, and a newly installed London business development executive in the form of Rachael Brown, MoneyMate is seeking to capitalise on the challenge of data management facing fund managers’ distribution operations.

According to CEO Paul Fawsitt, fund managers are seeking to gain control over the data they need to satisfy new and incoming regulations that are forcing unprecedented levels of transparency on the funds distribution process. The company sees significant opportunity as funds begin to act to address the new requirements. It hired Brown – formerly of Netik – to lead its business development function in London.

Regulations like the Retail Distribution Review (RDR – no relation) and FATCA (the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) are forcing firms to put their data houses in order when it comes to communications to investors concerning the funds they market.

Many larger firms with global operations are especially challenged by what Fawsitt calls the ‘tribal conflict’ effect, wherein nuances for local markets can create variations in the descriptions of fund products, ultimately causing problems for the firms from a compliance standpoint.

MoneyMate’s Fund ProductManager is an ASP-based data validation platform that applies business rules to funds’ descriptive data, resulting in a cleansed, standardised and accurate description of fund products distributed by the manager. This data is then used for populating product descriptions, information memorandums and web-sites and micro-sites used in the communication of product information to clients.

The current focus on transparency is a major driver. Funds are no longer stressing performance alone – in the form of a ‘star’ fund manager, for example – but rather are emphasising characteristics like ‘trust’, ‘brand’ and ‘reliability’. To underpin these messages – as well as to meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements – firms now want to provide clients with more information about the strategies underpinning their funds to give an idea of how the funds actually work.

Fawcitt says that by addressing data quality issues around distribution, fund managers can mitigate the risk of consequences of erroneous data – such as a litigation or other potentially damaging incident – while at the same time improve the client experience, increasing the likelihood of profitable repeat business or cross-selling.

The Fund ProductMaster platform runs at MoneyMate’s own data centres. It accepts data from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats. These include master product records; account/class level data; price and income information; expenses, charges and fees; returns, yields and breakdowns; country reference data; benchmark data; and third-party peer data from the likes of Barra, FactSet, Statpro, Morningstar and Lipper.

The platform applies both MoneyMate’s and firm-proprietary business rules to the data as required, and outputs either as a stream, to power web services, PDFs and emails, or as an extraction in XML, CSV or Excel. The process eliminates a raft of manual tasks, reducing both cost and error.

Exceptions are posted as alerts on a client dashboard, with messages sent both to the fund manager and the data source. MoneyMate’s own team monitors all activity to ensure that all output data is ready for primetime. Fawsitt reckons MoneyMate’s tailored solution can be quickly deployed for fast time to market.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: How to gain operational efficiency in corporate actions processing

While the risk associated with corporate actions is well established, many financial institutions continue with manual processing in the back office. More often than not, corporate actions information is manually keyed in and event processing lacks automation. This results in operational inefficiency, and financial risk due to missed events or simply getting it wrong. These...

BLOG

ESMA Data Strategy Proposes More Tech, Less Cost in Reporting Compliance

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its data strategy for 2023 to 2028. Key agenda points include using new data-related technologies, reducing reporting compliance costs for regulated entities, enabling effective use of data at both EU and national level, and making data more broadly available to the public. The five-year ESMA data...

EVENT

ESG Data & Tech Summit London

The ESG Data & Tech Summit will explore challenges around assembling and evaluating ESG data for reporting and the impact of regulatory measures and industry collaboration on transparency and standardisation efforts. Expert speakers will address how the evolving market infrastructure is developing and the role of new technologies and alternative data in improving insight and filling data gaps.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2023 – Eleventh Edition

Welcome to the eleventh edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a popular publication that covers new regulations in capital markets, tracks regulatory change, and provides advice on the data, data management and implementation requirements of more than 30 regulations across UK, European, US and Asia-Pacific capital markets. This edition of the handbook includes new...