As part of its outsourcing deal with the Germany-based asset manager, Société Générale Securities Services (SGSS) migrated Credit Suisse Asset Management’s data in just six months, according to the asset servicing firm. The implementation involved moving data regarding 66 funds and around 7,000 individual positions to investment management system SimCorp Dimension.
Credit Suisse Asset Management in Germany decided to outsource its fund administration in light of increasing regulatory constraints, growing market complexity and the need to focus on sales, portfolio management and investor services as core competencies, according to EMEA COO of the firm Gerhard Lohmann. SGSS Deutschland Kapitalanlagegesellschaft has been acting as the firm’s general funds administrator since October 2010, when the previous investment company, Credit Suisse Asset Management Kapitalanlagegesellschaft, was sold to SGSS and merged with it. SGSS provides the asset manager with front to back infrastructure for fund admin, including data management services as required by the risk and regulatory and customer reporting functions
The data migration aspect of the project was completed in “record time,” according to SGSS, noting that it took six months rather than the average nine. The process involved 66 funds at a volume of €6.5 billion with around 7,000 individual positions, implementing and designing 50 new reports, 300 investment guidelines and connecting 20 external partners that included deposit banks, advisory partners and investment trust companies.
Migration involved only two steps that took place within two weeks: 26 funds were transferred in the ?rst step, and 40 in the second. The process took place on two weekends, with 25 employees involved. In total, 40 staff were involved in the project, to which they dedicated between 10 to 100% of their working hours.
Given the appetite for outsourcing within the investment management community, which is faced with a barrage of new regulatory requirements, it is likely that asset services such as SGSS will be involved in many more of these projects over the course of this year. The data transparency aspects of the new regulation will also likely compel this requirement to be a focus of many of these deals going forward.
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