SkySparc

87% decrease in time spent on report creation

About KEVA

The Finnish Local Government Pensions Institution (Keva) looks after the pensions and pension funding of local government employees. It has EUR24.1 billion in funds under management and is Finland’s largest pension institution measured by the number of people insured and payment income. Keva’s membership organisations are all Finnish cities, other municipalities and joint municipal boards. Its membership comprises about 930 organisations.

Challenge

Keva, Finland's Local Government Pensions Institution, has been using Wallstreet Suite since 2002 for all its asset management functions. It upgraded Wallstreet Suite to enable it to trade a wider range of cross-border financial instruments. With this more complex trading environment including equities, fixed income, derivatives and structured products, it was faced with increased reporting requirements for regulatory and management reports. To avoid the need for lengthy, manual report creation it opted to deploy the powerful SkyREPORT solution to streamline these procedures, opening up new possibilities for the accessibility of real-time information.

Over the past five years the changing regulatory landscape in Europe has increased the types of instruments asset managers can invest in as well as their reporting requirements. Initially Wallstreet Suite's own reporting modules were used for the institution's reporting needs, along with Excel spreadsheets. But as many sources of data need to be combined to produce the required reports, the limitations of that arrangement soon became apparent.

"The main problem was that we needed to draw on data from Wallstreet Suite modules - Report Generator, Treasury Monitor, Performance Monitor etc.," says Juha Soininen, Head of Middle Office at Keva. "Data from all these sources had to be copied and pasted into Excel spreadsheets where the final reports were manually composed. As a result the whole process was very time consuming and there were also issues of accuracy due to the risk of human error. We also wanted to leverage Excel's graphical capabilities to a greater extent."

Solution

Keva first came across SkyREPORT at a Wall Street Systems User Group meeting. "We decided to start testing the solution after seeing SkySparc's presentations and hearing about the experiences of other user organisations," explains Mr Soininen. "At the time we weren't actively looking for a solution but when we saw SkySparc's presentation of SkyREPORT we found an immediate use for it - it was an obvious fit to solve our reporting problems and was very cost effective."

SkyREPORT's powerful, yet intuitive, reporting solution enables a wide range of Wallstreet Suite and external data, such as Bloomberg, to be combined and directly displayed in Excel. This allows greater flexibility and a simplification of Keva's reporting processes. Data from other systems used within Keva can also be consolidated into any reports. For example Keva has been looking into accessing data from its private equity application.

Mr Soininen explains that initially the solution was introduced gradually: "In the first stages I used SkyREPORT to replace some of my own reporting layouts and solutions. This gave me a good back­ground into the capabilities of the system and how it could be used to solve the problems faced by other departments, top management and risk management. I now use it daily in my job for checks and reconciliations plus allocation and exposure reports, which I use for risk management."