87% decrease in time spent on report creation
Challenges
Keva, Finland’s Local Government Pensions Institution, has been using Wallstreet Suite since 2002 for all its asset management functions. It upgraded the portfolio management system 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 OmniFi 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 the portfolio management system’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 various modules within the portfolio management system,” 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
“We decided to start testing the solution after seeing SkySparc’s presentations and hearing about the experiences of other user organizations,” explains Mr Soininen. “At the time we weren’t actively looking for a solution but when we saw SkySparc’s presentation of OmniFi we found an immediate use for it – it was an obvious fit to solve our reporting problems and was very cost effective.”
OmniFi’s powerful, yet intuitive, reporting solution enables data from Wallstreet Suite and a range of other sources, 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 OmniFi to replace some of my own reporting layouts and solutions. This gave me a good back ground 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.”
OmniFi has reduced the manual steps needed to produce our reports, and will continue to do so in the future.
Juha Soininen, Head of Middle Office, KEVA
Results
Since using OmniFi, Keva has been able to speed up report creation, increase accuracy, quickly respond to new reporting requirements, deliver new intelligence to the business and simplify testing of asset management system upgrades.
“OmniFi has reduced the manual steps needed to produce our reports,” says Mr Soininen, “and will continue to do so in the future. For example, typically it would have taken 15 minutes to update an allocation and exposure report, now it takes just a couple of minutes, which is a seven-fold decrease. This level of speed is also being found in many of the other functions in comparison with the old methods; it has opened up new reporting procedures that weren’t open to us previously.” OmniFi has also enabled greater access to reports. A major benefit is the ease with which senior management can gain access to real-time report data. Previously, if anyone in top management requested a report outside the usual reporting cycle, a member of staff had to manually update and collate the report and email it to the manager, which could take up to several hours.
Mr Soininen explains: “Now I have set up many of the report layouts in OmniFi, our Management, without previous experience, in one click, gain immediate access to updated real-time data. A further benefit has come in the form of testing security patches.
We always have to test every time an update is made to make sure nothing critical has been affected. OmniFi allows us to run these tests much faster and easier. The new release, OmniFi v3, has improved the reporting functionality even further. The upgrade was swift and smooth and we have now added more users across additional departments.”
