M&G Investments first looked at establishing a new product master data solution for its 50-odd retail funds back in the summer of 2009 and, after a detailed and in-depth couple of years of background research and planning, it has finally rolled out the first phase of buy side data management specialist vendor MoneyMate’s DataManager solution. Conor Smyth, senior vice president of sales at MoneyMate, explains the details of the deal that began back in the summer of 2010, when the vendor successfully won the request for proposal (RFP) process.
The firm went to the market with an RFP just before the summer in 2010 and they had spent the six to nine months prior to that defining their requirements, explains Smyth. Since MoneyMate won the deal, the vendor and M&G have been going through a very detailed analysis phase, before beginning the rollout this year.
“M&G chose to implement DataManager to act as a central hub for their product master data in order to put them in control of the data they are communicating to the market for retail funds,” says Smyth. “They will be using the platform to centralise and validate all of the different sources of information on these funds and then to use that data for their marketing collateral and to pass to their internal and external clients.”
The buy side firm has just gone live with the first phase around static data and the subsequent phases will be rolled out over the next few months, with the last phase planned for March or April next year, he explains. In total, there will be four phases, which will encompass things like the release of the configurable outputs that will sit on top of the database and an ad hoc query interface.
“The key driver for this initiative really was recognition within M&G that they had big aspirations to scale their business across Europe but they didn’t have the appropriate controls and accessibility to be able to leverage their product data properly. They decided to create a new department – the retail fund data management team – to partner with us to be able to leverage the platform,” he explains.
Earlier this year, M&G Investments also bolstered its internal data architecture with an extension of the GoldenSource EDM platform to cover other instruments such as OTC. Smyth notes that this data warehouse is a “key data source” for the MoneyMate platform internally within M&G.
Smyth notes that going forward, the sales and distribution side of these asset management firms are increasingly recognising the need for data quality and accessibility of product information. To this end, M&G is hoping that DataManager will help it to succeed in its initiative to adapt to new trends in client data requirements, regulatory scrutiny and risk management.
“I firmly believe that over the next five years, most if not all of the asset management firms in the market will respond to these drivers for increased transparency around product data,” he concludes.
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