Fifth Third Asset Management Implements Charles River IMS
Across Asset Classes and Locations
Automates workflows, ensures real-time compliance, and integrates with third-party providers
Boston, Beijing, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo – March 9, 2010 – Charles River Development (Charles River), a front- and middle-office investment software solutions provider, today announced that Fifth Third Asset Management (FTAM), has implemented the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS), supporting 50 FTAM users across its asset management operations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. FTAM also leverages the Charles River Network for real-time, global electronic trading via FIX (Financial Information eXchange). The project was delivered on-budget and accomplished FTAM’s primary strategy of consolidating all of its asset management clients onto one trading platform with integrated pre- and post-trade compliance management.
Fifth Third Asset Management is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fifth Third Bank with over $18.6 billion in domestic equity, domestic fixed income, and international equity assets under management. FTAM provides comprehensive advisory services through a collection of distinctive investment teams, backed by centralized operations functions, with a focus on risk management. FTAM offers an innovative asset management product line utilizing, mutual funds and separate accounts for retail and individual investors.
“Charles River IMS has allowed our portfolio managers and traders to design very efficient workflows,” said Stephen Hedger, Managing Director of Trading and Operations, FTAM. “These efficient workflows allow our professionals to easily implement their investment strategies while taking advantage of third-party data sources, such as real-time pricing, and efficiently accessing multiple equity and fixed income market venues via Charles River’s FIX network.”
During the initial phase, Charles River helped centralize and consolidate portfolio management and trading across FTAM’s domestic and international equity and fixed income desks under one platform. Working closely with FTAM’s internal experts, Charles River’s implementation team streamlined the portfolio management and trading process. The team also automated post-trade processing, pre- and post-trade compliance monitoring, and enabled FIX trading through the Charles River Network. The last phase of the implementation added FTAM’s Money Market Desks with a full array of SEC 2a7 compliance rules and FTAM internal compliance guidelines.
“Charles River understood and met our needs for mission-critical functionality across asset classes, investment styles, and our geographic locations,” says Hedger. “We’ve saved time over maintaining multiple applications and have significantly reduced our risk. Our portfolio managers and traders now have complete and robust audit trails that display the entire life of the order.”
Charles River accelerated the implementation by delivering tested and certified interfaces for eight of FTAM’s data and back-office providers. According to Hedger, “These interfaces, along with Charles River’s robust security asset master file configuration, ensure that we can establish securities real-time and further enrich multiple security types, including derivatives and complex fixed income instruments.”
Charles River’s implementation team also created direct FIX connections on the Charles River Network for 27 of FTAM’s equity brokers, as well as its three fixed income direct market access venues.
“We help clients like FTAM drive investment decisions and trading strategies by bringing streaming pricing and real-time data directly into the Charles River Manager Workbench and Charles River Trader Blotter,” said Tom Driscoll, Managing Director, Global, Charles River Development. “We have interfaces with major data providers and over 500 third-party trade and liquidity venues. Clients can also integrate quickly with additional execution venues via FIX, as well as other systems through Message-based APIs and exposed Web services.”
More than 120 buy-side firms and 440 global broker-dealers now use Charles River Network, which includes over 3,700 live FIX network connections. Internet-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) capability offers secure, low-cost FIX connectivity for smaller or remote firms or as a temporary solution during extended telcom installations.
About Charles River Development
Charles River Development is a front- and middle-office software solutions provider to more than 300 investment firms in the institutional, wealth management/trust, alternative, mutual fund, insurance, pension fund and fund administration/custody markets in over 35 countries. The Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) is an institutional-class multi-asset, multi-currency software suite that consists of five main modules: Charles River Manager for portfolio management and modeling; Charles River Compliance for real-time pre-trade, in-trade, post-execution and end-of-day compliance monitoring; Charles River Trader for order management, electronic trading and execution management; Charles River Post-Trade for the centralized management of trade matching, confirmation, and settlement workflow; and Charles River Performance for daily performance measurement, attribution, and performance risk.
Charles River IMS features a modern, proven, N-Tier service oriented architecture (SOA) that is highly scalable and supports continuous 24x7 operations. Message-based APIs and exposed Web Services facilitate rapid systems integration.
The system is fully integrated with the Charles River Network, a broker-neutral, financial network that incorporates global real-time electronic trading via FIX (Financial Information eXchange). Charles River also offers comprehensive FIX network and implementation services, as well as application management and hosting solutions.
Founded in 1984, Charles River maintains headquarters in Boston and primary offices in Beijing, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo and has a local presence in every other major financial center of the world.
Charles River is the recipient of numerous recent industry awards including: Best Buy-Side Order Management System and Best Integrated Front-Office Platform, Buy-Side Technology 2009 Awards; Best Risk Management System, AsianInvestor 2009 Service Provider Awards; and FinTech Top 100, American Banker/Financial Insights 2009. |
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