Five leading South African institutions leverage the Charles River
Investment Management System to automate operations
Charles River closes 2008 with an established South African presence
Boston, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo – January 22, 2009 – Charles
River Development (Charles River), an award-winning provider of financial software and services to the
global investment management community, today announced that in 2008 three additional South
African financial institutions selected the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River
IMS) to automate their front to middle office operations: Prudential Portfolio Managers (Prudential),
ABSA Capital (ABSA), and Sanlam Prime Services (SPS). These firms join STANLIB Asset
Management (STANLIB) and Metropolitan Asset Management (Metropolitan) and expand Charles
River’s South African client base to five buy-side firms.
“Charles River is pleased to partner with some of the top institutions in South Africa,” says Jon Steward,
Managing Director, EMEA, Charles River Development. “Our system has proven interfaces with local
South African vendors and serves the market’s unique requirements, including the country’s bond data
challenges, trade distribution requirements and account modeling.”
Prudential has $US10 billion in assets under management and selected Charles River IMS to replace
two existing and disparate front office solutions. The firm required a cross-asset system that could
handle complex fixed income instruments, automate its pre- and post-trade compliance processes and
support the firm’s growth plans.
ABSA Capital, representing approx 30% of South Africa’s unit trust custody market, is currently
implementing Charles River Compliance to automate compliance checks across all accounts and
support the firm’s growth plans.
SPS, a prime brokerage business and wholly-owned subsidiary of Sanlam Capital Markets, was the first
prime broker to implement Charles River IMS. The first phase of the project leveraged the system to
increase trading efficiency and operational transparency for the SIM’s GenX Statistical Arbitrage Hedge
Fund.
STANLIB, South Africa’s third-largest investment manager with US$41.4 billion of assets under
management, selected Charles River IMS in 2007 to automate the investment management of its segregated and pooled fund operations for all asset classes and to comply with client mandates.
Metropolitan, a leading fund manager, has used Charles River IMS since 2006 to automate its trade
workflow across all asset classes. Metropolitan selected Charles River IMS for its flexibility and
comprehensive functionality, including portfolio modeling scenarios, robust compliance tools, and FIX
capabilities.
“South Africa has recently seen an increase in cross border trading,” says Steward. “Monitoring
compliance and automating trade operations are central to ensuring the smooth evolution of the market.
Charles River IMS offers asset managers technology that is essential for growth on the international
stage, as well as the flexibility to comply with any local or international regulation or client mandate.”
In EMEA, Charles River has regional offices in London and Paris, a local presence in Frankfurt, sales
and service partners in South Africa and Dubai and supports nearly 75 buy-side clients in 14 countries.
About Charles River Development
Charles River Development is an award-winning provider of technology systems and services to over
310 investment firms in the institutional, mutual fund, banking, hedge fund, wealth management,
insurance and pension industries. The Charles River Investment Management System is a
comprehensive front- and middle-office software suite for all asset classes that includes: Charles River
Manager for portfolio management and modeling; Charles River Trader for order management and
electronic trading; Charles River Compliance for real-time pre-trade and end-of-day compliance; and
Charles River Post-Trade for the centralized management of trade matching, confirmation, and
settlement workflow. The system incorporates global real-time electronic trading via FIX (Financial
Information eXchange) through the Charles River Network, a broker-neutral financial network that is
fully integrated with Charles River IMS.
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 company also offers implementation and managed services (hosted and remote application
management). Founded in 1984, Charles River maintains headquarters in Boston and primary offices
in London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo.
In 2008, Charles River IMS received top honors in several major industry competitions, including: “Best
Buy-Side Order Management System” and “Best Integrated Front-Office Platform,” Buy-Side
Technology Awards 2008 and “Best Buy-Side Order Management System,” TradeTech 2008. |
|
