Wealth & Investment Management

Finance is uniquely positioned to drive a data-driven culture in full alignment with the business objectives

IBM Planning Analytics is perfectly positioned for Wealth & Investment management as a tool that can fully accommodate AUM reporting, month end close/ consolidation and planning & forecasting.

Complex import routines, shared data structures across AUM and financials, and instantaneous rule-driven updates are all incorporated to provide a single reporting and planning application across Finance.

System change is only part of the transformation journey and, whilst our knowledge and experience is concentrated on the systems side, we will work with you throughout the journey no matter the starting point.

A fully integrated solution that address all of the core reporting requirements

Routinely used as a data warehouse, IBM Planning Analytics is  capable of holding AUM at a client or position level and financials at a transactional level.

Import routines take data from any platform and any GL, standardise and aggregate to provide a single enterprise wide view, and instantaneously push down into a skinny reporting layer for quick and efficient reporting. Users can drill up or down each data dimension depending on whether a summarised or detailed view is required.

Ad hoc queries can be resolved quickly and confidently as the transactional data warehouse is held under the exact same data structure as the reporting layer.

IBM Planning Analytics tracks your asset book over time. Once sourced, data is stored and can be easily accessed via the in-memory analytics tool

• Hyper-segmentation across many reporting dimensions.
• Automatic calculation of inflows, outflows, transfers & investment performance.
• Client MI based of the same data set as EXCO reporting.
• Full audit trail from source system to final reports.

All the aggregation and segmentation capability for the AUM data applies to movements. Inflows, Outflows, Transfers and Investment Performance are tracked by Investment Manager, Branch, Client Type, Channel etc and many other business dimensions.

Transactional level data is sourced from the GL/ ERP tools and used to re-build and enrich the trial balance

Once sourced, the balances can be auto consolidated and pushed directly into the reporting layer.  Users can, if they wish, post manual adjustments to the balances with a full audit trail available to see the impact.  Principal benefits:

1. EXCO reporting, internal analytics (including AUM reporting) and external reporting are all driven from the same data set.
2. Control checks ensure that all tools are in alignment.
3. All reports can be drilled through to the underlying transactional detail.
4. Hyper-segmentation => much more detailed analysis than traditional GL tools allow.
5. Month end is significantly shorter, giving finance teams much more time for business partnering activities.
6. The powerful excel add-in mitigates most risks of using excel, yet users are comfortable in a tool they are familiar with.

Driver based, active planning to support decision making

Research suggests that finance teams without an automated solution will spend over 50% of their time collecting and then validating information, leaving little time for the value added activity of planning and forecasting.

Placing reliance on the actuals data from AUM and financial reporting, driver-based planning models focused on the core drivers of AUM, headcount and inflation can readily be incorporated.  Using the same data structures, actuals are instantaneously incorporated into the rolling forecast giving immediate insight to facilitate decision making.