Performance Implementation for Large Insurance Company

Client-Reporting | Meradia

BACKGROUND

A Fortune 500 company’s asset management division retained Meradia to help facilitate the conclusion of a challenging implementation of and conversion to SS&C’s Sylvan Global Performance Measurement and Risk platform. Meradia provided portfolio accounting, performance measurement and testing expertise and identified and troubleshooted errors hindering progress. Issues impacting Sylvan, the data flows, defined acceptance criteria, test scripts and plans, project staffing, production staffing and workflow were included in Meradia’s scope of work.

ANALYSIS

While working with the team, Meradia identified several key issues that needed to be addressed and remedied:

  • Business requirements were incomplete and did not capture all required upstream data sources. Meradia needed to re-evaluate requirements and interview key stakeholders to provide a more complete assessment of data to be converted.
  • There was a lack of internal knowledge of Sylvan that prevented the project team from identifying issues and areas of risk.
  • The quality of the legacy system’s underlying data needed to be cleaned up. We added a data scrubbing effort to the project timeline and roadmap as a critical dependency.

Meradia’s team instituted a streamed and phase approach that:

  • Identified and resolved performance discrepancies between the legacy systems and the Sylvan systems
  • Defined and performed testing to ensure the accuracy of calculated portfolio and performance benchmarks
  • Liaised between project team and program management staff to ensure accurate and timely reporting of issues, project status, milestones and timelines
  • Created and delivered, in conjunction with both the technology vendor and the end-client, an effective training curriculum (including training materials) for users of the new platform
  • Recommended and tested changes in software coding to align calculation methodologies across multiple applications utilized by the end-client’s performance measurement group
  • Designed, tested and validated new operational reporting tools and procedures to meet strict operational readiness requirements.

RESULTS

The new performance measurement and risk system, Sylvan, was introduced into production ahead of schedule despite the early project challenges prior to Meradia’s engagement. Meradia helped accelerate the retirement of the legacy system and avoided additional upgrades to that platform. The legacy system had been in service at the insurance organization since the mid-1990s and the firm operated on a very old version of the platform. The new platform was a significant enhancement to the organization’s front office and distribution teams, and most importantly, it enhanced the client experience.

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