Transamerica Retakes Control of Fund Data
February 17, 2010
When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was enacted in 2002, Transamerica Asset Management decided to outsource the administration of its three mutual fund families.
By the end of the decade, the St. Petersburg unit of the life insurance and investment products firm Aegon, which is based in The Netherlands, decided it wanted to take back control.
The reason: Documents that it was producing about its funds were going down to the wire too often, not allowing “as good a review as we would like,’’ said Robert A. Devault, director of financial reporting and operations.
Its approach was to review available pre-built technology that it could then use to administer its funds and produce reports about them, on its own.
"If you're going to build a car, kind of custom, and it's going to be a Bentley or something that is hand-tooled all the way through, is it going to be a better car than a Ford that just comes off the line? It probably is,’’ he said Tuesday at the National Investment Company Service Association, in panel session on technology initiatives in the mutual fund industry..
"But if you've got 110 funds, 17,000 securities and you need to get it done in a certain time period, you need to have straight-through-processing. You need to make decisions" that stay in that environment.
To get to the point where asset management information could be processed smoothly and put straight into reports, Transamerica decided to base its approach on a software product from Confluence that creates a single hub for all data the company would use.
The key to using the Pittsburgh company’s Unity platform, Devault said, proved to be cleaning up discrepancies in data, before information went into the hub. Then Transamerica could have confidence in the accuracy of any reports that its staff produed.
This scrubbing can be difficult. It’s not a matter of finding you "push a button and everything would be okay," he said.
It took hiring accountants and other financial reporting staff members who had a geek gene or experience in working on help desks or in some form of programming. And attention to detail, in the preparation of the data.
But, once done, the company found itself finishing reports 10 to 15 days ahead of printing deadlines, allowing for sufficient reviews to control accuracy and quality. Having a system that could work “straight through” from receipt of data to production of report also gave more flexibility and saved cost.
Now, portfolio managers and marketing teams, for instance, can make update information on funds by making changes on their own in an electronic content management system, for instance.
The streamlining, he says, has given the company more control and “more of a comfort level” about the information it reports to customers and produces to comply with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.
