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ADVISORY SERVICES
Strategy and Roadmap
Solution Design
Vendor Selection
Competitive Assessment
System Rationalization
STRATEGY & ROADMAP
Implementing an effective strategy is vital to keeping an organization moving forward as well as attracting and maintaining clients. Designing a strategy that expertly integrates both technology and operations begins with looking at the business top down and bottom up. You must understand the business as it is now, but more importantly where it is going and how to reach the future state. Creating a successful roadmap includes achieving both short- and long-term tactical and strategic goals, demonstrating accomplishments, and maintaining momentum to move the process forward.
Meradia Consultants have proven success working with clients to envision a strategy that works for their business. Our team takes a practical, real-world approach that rethinks the model, as well as addresses and aligns our clients’ current and future business goals. We collaborate to strategically transform their operating models and build an executable roadmap that keeps them competitive and moving forward in this quickly changing world.
GIPS® ADVISORY
Meradia provides strategic advisory to transform your operations with global best practices. We also help firms comply with and implement the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®), provide pre-verification services, and keep up to date with existing and forthcoming investment performance regulations.
GIPS® is a registered trademark owned by CFA Institute. CFA Institute does not endorse or promote this organization, nor does it warrant the accuracy or quality of the content contained herein.
SOLUTION DESIGN
Investment managers of reasonable size and complexity need any new system to integrate with their existing collection of best-of-breed applications. Even though software vendors often describe their products as “complete solutions,” they rarely meet all investment managers’ requirements.
At the beginning of Solution Design, Meradia consultants identify goals, resources, and constraints. We have the experience to recognize risk early on, and the maturity to know how to size the risk, and recommend mitigation options. Additionally, Meradia consultants know what software vendors will and should do, as well as what they cannot and should not do.
When integrating a new system, we ensure critical elements are defined including a collection of applications, data stores, integration points, and orchestration events that solve specific problems. Meradia’s capabilities include developing and testing Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) workflows, Web dashboards, and ancillary databases.
VENDOR SELECTION
Our clients require third party vendor tools and services to operate, all of which need to be integrated into a harmonious whole. Over time, the needs change and it is necessary to add or remove vendors from the mix.
Meradia works with our clients throughout this process, helping them identify candidates for rationalization, requirements for bringing on new vendors, and approaches to adopting an out-sourced service arrangement. We deploy our proven methodologies to streamline selection, focusing on both the differentiating characteristics of the requirements and of the vendors.
COMPETITIVE ASSESSMENT
Whether our clients are industry vendors looking to understand gaps in the market or asset managers looking for improved perspective on operational efficiency relative to peers, a competitive assessment can yield invaluable insights.
Meradia consultants have been tackling challenges with operations technology for over 20 years. From working on investment performance technology to important accounting selections or a client reporting RFP, our experience with firms that span the investment industry directly benefits you. We leverage our extensive network to gain market, vendor, and product insights which can be tough to garner from within an organization. We have worked hand-in-hand with asset managers to help them understand operational efficiency relative to peers. We have helped vendors better understand their market position and see opportunities for product expansion they haven’t yet tapped. Clients improve both their understanding of their operations and benefits yet to be tapped by hiring Meradia’s senior team for competitive assessment work.
SYSTEM RATIONALIZATION
System Rationalization is the process of distilling application architecture into easy-to-understand business terms. We identify what individual components do, when they do it, why they do it, and for whom. Rationalization often identifies duplication of effort, bottlenecks around legacy applications, and is an important step in determining the true cost of business services.
Decades of industry experience allow us to quickly analyze your business applications and determine how they are used across your firm. We can then work to understand your business needs and goals, and gain an understanding of your technology road map. Armed with this knowledge, we help you determine which ones should be kept, replaced, retired, or consolidated to optimize your business operations.
