EFA

Since its founding EFA’s range of services have expanded far beyond classic fund administration services to include middle and back office services, as well as private assets.

The background:

In 2007, EFA selected SimCorp Data Management (formerly AIM Software) to consolidate and industrialize the collection, validation, and dispatch of securities and financial instruments forstatic data and pricing to its core operational system.

Since then SimCorp continuously supported EFA’s business growth, operating its portfolios and data volumes as they multiplied over the years.

The solution:

In 2012, EFA became a development partner for what is today SimCorp Data Management for Market Data. EFA’s requirements as a fund administrator meant they needed to be able to price different portfolios according to their individual pricing policies. Together, they developed a solution that met EFA’s functional specifications to evaluate each portfolio holistically.

Jean-Luc Macheret, Head of IT Applications and Integration, in charge of EFA’s core applications covering all business lines from fund accounting and middle office services to private asset services, shares his thoughts:

In a second phase, EFA also implemented Security Master from SimCorp Data Management to help them centralize and simplify their securities data management. 

EFA uses SimCorp Data Management solution not only as a traditional back-end enterprise data management platform, but also as a front-end application. Several teams at EFA use the intuitive user interfaces in their daily operations with personalized dashboards. They benefit from guaranteed data quality and accuracy and can focus their time on actionable insights.

Jean-Luc Macheret,
Head of IT Applications and Integration at EFA

The business value:

Since adopting SimCorp Data Management, EFA has been able to significantly increase the number of portfolios to be priced, subsequently manage additional data and pricing volumes, while reducing manual and time-consuming operational work. 

Today EFA calculates around 43,000 prices daily* and encounters a 91% STP rate significantly reducing exceptions. This means that the process of collecting, validating and sending prices to EFA’s core platform is now completely automated, creating invaluable efficiency gains. 

Starting your own data management transformation project?

Jean-Luc Macheret, Head of IT Applications and Integration, offers two recommendations before starting a data management transformation project.

• Recommendation #1 - Have a sponsor from the business team
  “It’s important to have a strong sponsor to align the project with the wider company data strategy including any data centralization projects.”  
• Recommendation #2 - Choose the right vendor 
  “Ensure that your vendor can provide the right level of support and reactiveness when required, for example going through different upgrades and evolving with you as your needs evolve.”