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Top 10 Asset Management Solution Providers 2016

Fiserv [NASDAQ:FISV]: AUTOMATED ASSET MANAGEMENT

Every day at 4 PM, when the closing bell resonates through the trading floors of America’s biggest stock exchanges, weary investors and their asset managers assess the ground situation, balancing the sheets of profit and lose. The same applies for quarterly and other periodical report filing sessions, where private investors and partners hear summaries on what they stand to gain over their venture. Behind the screens, doing the complex and intricate number crunching are an elite group of financial services companies that orchestrate the entire lifecycle of investments for venture capitalist firms, governments and sometimes even high net worth individuals. Displaying a rich prowess in financial services technology since 1984, Fiserv [NASDAQ:FISV], is an institutional asset management firm that has clinched global recognition in the area of financial control. Along its assiduous journey over the years, Fiserv has evolved into a financial services technology savant, catering to a global clientele that includes banks, investment advisers, securities broker dealers, leasing and finance companies, and retailers. Moving with a rapid market momentum under the helmsmanship of Jeffrey Yabuki, CEO, Fiserv, today the company’s comprehensive lineup of solutions help firms and investors track and trace their range of investments, and make informed decisions at the right time for success.

Since the first ever instance of investment in the early 1900s, the financial landscape has been pronouncing vacillating changes with sweeping, frequent amendments made to the regulatory mandates. Fiserv’s Institutional Asset Management Solutions are designed to be in line with these trends, where its customers are constantly learning to adapt and manage the new demands. From automated fee billing to the numerous post-trade procedures involved in investment management, Fiserv’s customers are reaping the benefits along the entire value chain, by automating manual processes, eliminating errors and risks, and enhancing operational efficiency.

Steady Cash Inflow

For instance, the Advantage Fee product from Fiserv relieves financial services companies from their mundane and iterative task of billing their clients amidst the shifting climate of the financial industry. With an automated process, Fiserv allows customers to streamline and improvise their billing structures along with the revisions made at the federal or corporate level, at the same time ensuring no revenue leaks. The integrated solution employs best-practices so as to enable a financial services company to comply with industry regulations, such as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), and Sarbanes- Oxley. The automated bill generating capabilities send invoices in clear and concise formats periodically, enhancing visibility for the investors, stock brokers, and other financial instruments involved in the process. This greatly improves revenue cycle management and cash flow, even at times of fluctuating market dynamics. Asset managers can also create customized ad-hoc reports by using the simplified SQL features like sorting, ordering, and filtering, to scout through voluminous data for specific purposes.

Designed specifically for large brokerage firms and private client environments, Caliper is capable of calculating investment performance for millions of accounts, overnight

Data analytics embedded in the Advantage Fee tool helps in forecasting fee-based revenues with the combined support of market research and assumptions made by professionals. At the same time, the asset manager is alerted about potential risks associated with a particular range of investment by means of the historical data along with hypothetical data and construct precise forecasting models. The alarming rate of data that gets accumulated in this process can be programmed to store necessary information—that is required for auditing purposes—and remove the redundant data through data archival and purge capabilities.

A Yardstick for Performance

Asset managers are required to guide their customers though the labyrinth of investment entities, retreat from any risky ventures and increase their stakes on flourishing businesses. For this purpose, they constantly have to baseline and benchmark the health of the portfolio and Fiserv’s Caliper Performance Manager, a standalone investment performance engine and data warehouse is equipped to efficiently handle this objective. Designed specifically for large brokerage firms and private client environments, Caliper is capable of calculating investment performance for millions of accounts, overnight. Regardless of the investment vehicle, such as stocks, bonds, futures, cash, and derivatives, asset managers can now process and compute performance for different accounts. The underlying open architecture database and data warehouse algorithms powering Caliper administers seamless integration of disparate systems, like portfolio accounting, and legacy brokerage platforms. Enabling easy configurability that requires minimal human intervention possible, Caliper gives an edge to asset managers who can effortlessly calculate high volumes of time-weighted and money-weighted rates of return.

Advocating further visibility for asset managers is Fiserv’s Global Investment Manager (GIM), a flexible, enterprise-wide solution for portfolio accounting and performance measurement. Similar to Caliper, the GIM is built on an open architecture, complete with a single-relational database that encompasses a multitude of traditional financial instruments, as well as the newer, more productive and functional means.

The tool provides dedicated support and transparency to all the financial entities, at the same time, complies with emerging federal as well as regional regulatory and capital requirements. Promising affordability and economical operational costs, the solution reduces cost overhead that often tags along with implementation of new infrastructure components, by serving as a missing link that bridges the gap caused by legacy structures.

The financial environment is supported by many simple and complex corporate action workflows, such as stock re-purchase, dividend, re-investment, and capital distribution processing. With GIM, an asset manager can set up simple rules and complex queries to access system workflow data, generate reports, and for further analysis. The reports generated from an interactive dashboard can be of a varied list of formats, such as .xml, .csv, .xls, and .txt. Fully scalable, the platform is designed in such a way so that Fiserv’s customers can rapidly take on new clients and instrument classes and support global expansion as and when trading volumes increase.

"Fiserv’s Institutional Asset Management Solutions are designed to be in line with the modern-day trends, where its customers are constantly learning to adapt"

Ruling the Roost

With tools such as Caliper GIM that provide a comprehensive approach to managing an investor’s assets, Fiserv’s footprint in the global market has reached unprecedented horizons. At the same time, the company is propelling itself, constantly raising the bar, to stay at the vanguard of innovation in the financial arena. Having amassed more than 13,000 clients on a global scale, Fiserv has also earmarked a spot for itself in mobility for financial services. Poised at the helm of this innovation, the company’s mobile person-to-person (p2p) payment technology has already received recognition for its proven flexible techniques in personal banking. At the same tempo, Fiserv is ready to take institutional asset management to a whole new level of business efficacy.

In the grand scheme of things, the U.S. is all set to tilt the market from Europe towards itself as the nation’s firms continue to increase their investments in global assets. With that, a horde of transformational agents is set to create a ripple effect in the global market, estimating the total volume of investable assets at $64 trillion by 2020. Fiserv’s three-decade worth of financial industry expertise gives the company, and its customers, the much needed edge over their competitors in such times. The company has clearly positioned itself to be always ahead of the curve, trying to make the work of an asset manager simple and hassle-free and the trend is set to continue.

- chithra Vijayakumar
October 19, 2016