Case Study

Investment Data Hub

The client embarked on a journey to implement a digital operating environment for its Fund Administration function. The operational transformation has resulted in cost and risk reduction for the department, company, and fund shareholders, improved employee engagement, and elevated scale. The new platform implementation has enabled the client to realize the following benefits:

20% reduction

in fund expenses

$12.4 million

cost savings

$7.1 million

cost avoidance

30k+ hours

annual capacity generated

Olmstead’s Impact 

Olmstead led the concept, design, and build of the Investment Data Hub (IDH) that lay at the heart of the client’s transformation. The initial business use case was new IBOR and ABOR across 30+ external sub-advisors, re-engineered security, portfolio holdings, and price master entities, and enabling the SEC N-Port regulatory requirement.  Olmstead’s talent included operating model experts, data architects, modelers, and ETL engineers, cloud migration expertise, and risk business analysts, all with asset management industry expertise. Olmstead also brought data governance best practices to help the client create an ownership framework to ensure ongoing trust in the data.

The IDH is a central data warehouse that eliminates the need for manual processes and databases. Before the IDH, end user computing solutions were inefficient and time consuming, resulting in high resource costs, excess external vendor support, and reactive risk management practices. Using a data-centric architecture, the IDH was built to be a single source of truth.  Among many, it sources data from MarkitEDM, fund sub-advisers, and MSCI and feeds CRD, BarraOne, and FactSet.

Always focusing on adding business value, Olmstead worked with the client to define and deliver key use cases during the data platform’s construction, and ensured our client was well positioned to extract ongoing value from the platform after Olmstead departed.  To illustrate, 200+ Excel files and 2750 manual touchpoints have been eliminated, and 250+ workflows and PowerBI reports have been developed with user enabled technologies such as PowerBI and Alteryx.

“Olmstead’s data-centric approach to addressing our business needs provided us with a data platform upon which we have transformed our business.  Without this flexible and trusted foundation we couldn’t have digitized our way towards the top of our peer group in fund expense management.” 

Key Takeaways

    1. Done right, your modern data platform will become a platform for innovation and growth.
    2. In order to create trust and momentum, it is important to deliver business value early and iteratively, even while the strategic platform is being built.
    3. End goals must include client self-sufficiency, user empowerment, and strong data governance to ensure our solutions are built to grow with the client’s needs.