SunGard Upgrades Asset Arena InvestOne for ‘Multiple Books of Record’

New to InvestOne, its Multiview accounting piece has been enhanced to offer new Multiple Books of Record (MBOR) capabilities. Users can support multiple valuations from one set of transaction data with this new offering, Karen Doolan, managing director of SunGard's Asset Management business, tells Buy-Side Technology.

"The functionality allows customers to manage a transaction once and utilize it to support their daily ABOR, tax books and IFRS [International Financial Reporting Standards] records," she says. "In one case, we have a customer who has historically maintained ABOR and tax books on multiple systems, requiring significant effort to manage the reconciliation involved. They are now looking to run both sets of records through MBOR, managing the transactions once and removing the need for reconciliation."

MBOR—a term that SunGard has been championing—is an evolution from the standard Accounting Book of Records (ABOR), which are processed on a T+1 basis, and the now-popular Investment Book of Record (IBOR), which requires a trade date book of records to support the middle-office functions of client reporting and performance measurement and to feed the front office with its trading book for the next morning.

"MBOR satisfies the back-office requirement for maintaining separate books of record which follow different accounting rules than the NAV or ABOR book," Doolan says. "For example, tax calculations require modifications to the cost basis of an account, and IFRS compliance requires different fund valuation rules for fixed income instruments."

Also new with this release is the vendor's Asset Arena Control Center, which is an operational management and monitoring solution. Doolan says that Control Center allows customers to manage their operational workflow though a set of online processes which are automated and managed in real time.

"The real-time nature of the solution allows managers to monitor their operations throughout the business day to review the accounting processes in the context of the deadlines and service levels that apply," she says. "For both asset managers and custodians, this automation and transparency is valuable to achieving both operating cost and risk reduction objectives."