Client Case Study: Managed Data Services

Business opportunity

Like many in the financial industry, this large North American Fund Administrator, needed to comply with the FASB regulation FAS 157 — fair market value. They wanted an external partner to develop a “value added service” to their existing pricing model that allowed external fund managers to compare and select, at the fund level, the prices to be used when valuing their holdings. Our clients’ requirements included:

• The quick adaptation of complex regulatory requirements providing pricing transparency
• Exceed clients’ ongoing demands for fund administrators to provide fund specific pricing models
• Enable the collecting of and cleansing of data from multiple vendors while building automations for data usage and exception reduction and management
• Limited internal bandwidth and short time to market

Our solution

Broadridge’s Managed Data Services provided our client with a complete solution balancing flexibility in pricing strategies with valuation oversight. The combination of Broadridge’s best-of-breed products, Tier IV data centers, a global service team, and speed to market offered true value. Broadridge’s solution enabled our client to continue offering the highest standards in support for investment managers while minimizing the risks associated with an in-house solution.

In a few months, the new pricing, analytics, and reporting capabilities were fully integrated into our client’s platform. They are now able to offer their global clients multiple pricing sources with fund specific customization, including options from a hierarchy of more than nine sources of data, hard to price assets, and sophisticated price modeling. Our solution included:

• Enhanced service that delivers price calculation capabilities, including blended bid and offer prices and calculating depository receipt prices based on the underlying asset price. Client investment managers can quickly select, at a fund level, the rules to be used when valuing their holdings and ensure that funds are “fairly valued.”

• Asset managers can review pricing model effectiveness and analyze pricing exceptions and variances with improved analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling them to modify their internal pricing policies as regulatory changes and/or investment strategies dictate.

• Complex business rules are defined by the end client and validated against prices received from multiple data vendors. “Winning prices” are then made available to the appropriate accounting systems at various pricing points during the day to allow for portfolios to be valued.

• Data collection from multiple vendors, data scrubbing for inaccuracies, building and maintaining date usage rules, and exception management are handled entirely by Broadridge’s team of experts, freeing up resources to focus on business growth activities and lowering total cost of ownership.

• Broadridge’s Managed Data Services is available to all fund managers and fund administrators as an “off the shelf” solution to a problem that had once required a significant investment in technology and people.