Buy-Side Technology Awards 2017: Best Implementation at a Buy-Side Firm—SimCorp Coric
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In July 2016, WatersTechnology ran a story about Marathon Asset Management inking a deal with SimCorp that would see the London-based investment manager replace its incumbent client reporting platform with SimCorp Coric, the roll-out of which wins this year’s best implementation category. Rimes Technologies won this category last year, thanks to its work with AXA Investment Managers in New York, while Vermilion was the recipient for the previous three consecutive years—from 2013 to 2015—by virtue of its highly though-of Vermilion Reporting Suite, now part of the FactSet stable.
The SimCorp-Marathon relationship can be traced back to the start of 2016 when Marathon opted to decommission its legacy client reporting platform and replace it with a workflow-driven, scalable platform. According to SimCorp, the new platform had to be able to deliver high-quality reports designed, developed and maintained by Marathon’s client service team without IT support, while also automating a number of previously manual processes, particularly around data validation and commentary collation. The aim of the project was to provide Marathon with the capacity to support the generation and distribution of monthly and quarterly investment reports, as well as all ad hoc client presentations.
The project started in June 2016 with a planned go-live date for the following January. The project team comprised four SimCorp consultants and staff from Marathon’s client service, performance and IT teams. The build initially focused on the source data, ensuring that all data required for the generation of reports was accessible in the right format and at the right time. Report templates were then built on top of the data, and end-to-end automation of the commentary workflow process was then incorporated. A two-way interface with Marathon’s CRM platform was also developed, pulling in client information to Coric, and pushing activity information back into the CRM system once reports had been distributed. A full test phase and parallel run was undertaken late in 2016, before the project went live on time and budget on 1st January.
SimCorp principal implementation consultant spent four days a week on site at Marathon, which improved communication and transparency across both organizations. When key pieces of work were being delivered by other members of the SimCorp team, they too would spend time on-site ensuring that they worked with key stakeholders from Marathon when delivering changes. The team worked collaboratively, with fortnightly steering groups providing project governance and maintaining collaboration between the two firms.
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