Author: Meradia Consultant

5 Client Experience Trends – And Why Your Firm Should Be Paying Attention

As financial firms seek to expand distribution, enhance efficiency, reduce costs and improve performance, they must also focus on the client experience. From the initial point of contact to ongoing client servicing and reporting, all interactions matter – and your clients are taking note. Negative experiences could lead to lost revenue, but positive experiences could be the key to unlocking future revenue. To ensure your business is staying competitive, consider these five trends shaping the client experience today.

by Timothy W. Jager, Principal…

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4 Steps To Establish a Successful Proof of Concept Scope

The most effective system implementations start by establishing a proof of concept (POC) to validate a vendor’s ability to support your requirements and highlight areas where custom solution design may be required. A key component of a successful POC is a clearly defined scope that identifies the types of scenarios, number of portfolios, goals and criteria for completion. Yet we see time and time again firms overlook this element. Here are four key steps to establish a thoughtful POC scope that will allow your implementation to go off without a hitch.

by Nicol S. O’Connor, Senior Consultant

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Agile and Waterfall: How To Marry the Two Approaches To Project Management

The two main approaches to project management, Waterfall and Agile, are often viewed as mutually exclusive. Though it’s true they may have little reusable overlap, each is helpful in setting expectations and tracking iterative development and nuanced progress updates. But what happens when you are managing an Agile team and the executive committee wants Waterfall-style reporting? Let’s explore how to unite the teams that work and view progress differently.

by Elizabeth M. Colebrooke, Principal…

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Control Your Data: Don’t Let Your Data Control You

Financial services organizations have complex and rapidly-evolving data requirements. Whether it’s navigating compliance with ESG standards or diversifying investment products into complex derivatives instruments and alternative investments, the challenges feel never-ending or even flat-out impossible to solve. This begs the question: Are you controlling your data or is your data controlling you?

by John E. Leavy,…

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RFP Blues: Hitting the High Notes

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC

Have you ever been to JazzFest in New Orleans? If not, I highly recommend it: ten or more stages – zydeco, jazz, blues, rock, country, gospel, African, krewes, big names, local names – all playing at the same time. The problem is:  standing in the middle, program in hand, faint music coming from all directions, people celebrating – what’s your choice going to be?

Each listener has a different strategy, but I’ll tell you what absolutely no one does:  send out multi-page questionnaires in advance to each and every band asking them about their style, instrumentation, influences, playlist, recording history, etc. Nobody RFP’s JazzFest.

by Mark R. David, CFA…

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Client-Reporting | Meradia

Client Reporting for Wealth Managers: Taming the Challenges of Bespoke Meeting Books

Wealth managers offer a variety of services for high net worth, ultra-high net worth and institutional clients. Their services may include investment advisory, portfolio management, administration and oversight of trusts, monitoring against investment policy statements, goals-based wealth planning, total net worth aggregation and management of gifts and grants for endowments and foundations.

For multi-service wealth managers, there are a multitude of challenges in efficiently preparing client meeting books. They can include exhibits relevant to some or all these services. Advisors and support staff compile data points from multiple sources in multiple formats to create a comprehensive book which often takes hours to produce the finished product for a single client meeting. Here within we address solutions to making client reporting more efficient while maintaining flexibility and a high standard of quality.

by Thomas E. Alex, PMP, Principal

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Re-Engineering Karnosky-Singer: Utility, Versatility and Insight for Practical Multi-currency Management

In 1994, Denis S. Karnosky, Ph.D. and Brian D. Singer, CFA published a monograph entitled “Global Asset Management and Performance Attribution” (KS). They presented the idea that – due to the arbitrage known as interest rate parity – some contribution to the total return of a multi-currency portfolio is known, and ‘baked into’ a foreign-currency investment at the time it is made. Because this contribution is knowable and hedge-able, it should accrue to the currency market allocations of the manager – whether or not these are ultimately hedged.

While hugely influential among asset managers globally, these ideas remain largely unexploited in current performance practice. Though KS fully detail an attribution approach based on an expansion of the Brinson-Fachler method, and though this method is implemented in several commercially available performance systems – it is rarely adopted in the field.

We posit this circumstance to have arisen from several causes: misalignments between the paper’s formulation and practical investing reality, as well as inaccurate readings of, and consequently flawed implementations of the attribution method it sets out. We explore these causes in detail, and how they contribute to attribution results that fail to explain portfolio performance, obscuring the otherwise substantial value of KS’ central premise.

Finally, we develop a re-statement of KS that addresses those issues, producing an accurate decomposition of multi-currency effects that precisely explains the portfolio’s performance, while preserving the original paper’s essential insight. We go further to generalize this method and demonstrate its applicability to any investment attribution methodology.

by Mark R. David, CFA, Director of Performance, Risk and Analytics

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Protect an Organizational Investment by Avoiding Common Mistakes During a System Conversion

Once an organization has decided on a new system, the conversion process follows. Large-scale system conversions are complex, time consuming and expensive; however, they are necessary for investment management companies to tackle sooner or later. Whether the system is a data management tool, portfolio accounting, performance, trading or reporting system, there are key steps an organization should take to ensure both a successful conversion and to avoid risks and pitfalls.
Each implementation is different, and many aspects come into play such as customization, resource availability, volume of data that needs to be converted and hardware requirements. Simply having a plan in place will not ensure success. This paper provides guidance on how to successfully navigate key aspects common to implementation projects.

by John E. Leavy, Principal

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Front Office Technology Transformation Projects Require a Specialized Project Management Approach

Technology transformation projects are inherently challenging – from determining how a specific firm compiles their data and technology, to innumerable decisions to be made, data files to validate, functionality to configure and test, to go-live events. When technology transformation projects impact front office teams, a highly specialized project management approach must be employed to minimize disruptions to uber time-sensitive front office revenue-generating productivity while keeping the project on schedule.
While the definition of ‘front office’ differs among organizations, here within the front office references a few distinct groups: Portfolio Management, Trading, Quantitative Analysts and Risk Managers. These front office groups fulfill critical roles involving time-sensitive initiatives. They represent investment management firms’ strategy and intellectual capital, and directly generate revenue for investment management firms. Their skills are the costliest; therefore, their time is at a premium. This paper shares the keys to executing this specialized, non-disruptive approach to managing front office technology transformation projects.

by Elizabeth M. Colebrooke, Principal

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Design Thinking: How to Integrate Creativity into Data-Driven Business

The financial services industry has always been required to embrace change, whether it be driven internally to control cost and sustain growth or driven externally to address and leverage market conditions. Given the rapidly evolving technology environment, volatile markets and globalization; companies are searching for ways to more successfully innovate to meet these challenges and take advantage of this environment by offering new products and services. To do this effectively, an organization must be able to understand customer needs, identify viable business and operating models and ensure their offering is technically possible and deliverable within the parameters of their risk profile.

By integrating a design thinking approach, organizations can more effectively consider the outcomes for the end users of their systems and processes. What will their experience be like? How do the systems and processes provide value to them? How do the deliverables solve their pain points and/or business needs?

by Daniel G. Foley, Principal

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