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Connecting the Portfolio Management System to the Depository
Banks BCV and UBS using UBS Asset Link
About Alasia Investments SA
Alasia Investments SA is a Lausanne based Asset Manager. With
over 350 customer-portfolios to manage, Alasia is a typical, medium sized player.
This means that the manual handling of transactions becomes more and more painful.
In order to automate the communication with its depository banks, Alasia Investments
turned to Incentage.
The Problem
Even thought the type of information being delivered by each depository bank is
similar, the way it is structured (syntax) and the meaning (semantics) is very
different. The major problem is that each bank defines its own standard which
is updated regularly. These release cycles vary in terms of frequency and schedule.
As a result, the portfolio management system connected to the banks is under constant
pressure for change which worsens the availability of the system.
As the representation of certain business elements varies between depositary banks,
so it does also between asset managers. For example an asset manager might introduce
his own naming-convention for portfolios, which may differ from the naming of
the bank and also from the naming of a fellow asset manager.
The Solution
| With Incentage, the portfolio management system
(PMS) gets the information from all banks in one syntax and one semantics.
This reduces the complexity considerably. The PMS is not directly exposed
to the individual release cycles of the banks anymore. Furthermore, the
manufacturer of the PMS can focus on real added value items and thus the
asset manager profits from improved responsiveness. Finally, the time required
to integrate an additional depository bank is considerably reduced. The
modular architecture of an Incentage solution - using loosely coupled components
instead of monolithic applications - helped to overcome the second major
problem common to this kind of interfaces. A separate, site specific component
allows the client to fully participate in all standards updates, since his
specific functionality is shielded from the release cycles. |
| "We especially appreciated the availability and the
speed of analysis and implementation that Incentage showed". Carmine
Salerno, Project Manager at Alasia Investments |
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What Incentage did
When Alasia Investments first thought about automating the communication
between their PMS system and the depository bank, it turned to
its PMS supplier, Expersoft Systems. With the help of Incentage
Expersoft had just realised an interface to the UBS AssetLink
data feed. So the integration with the AssetLink feed was no problem.
More difficult proved the integration of the information from
BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise), with which Alasia also had some
of its portfolios. There was no off-the-shelf solution available
for this feed yet. Here Incentage´s long track-record in the securities
industry together with its expertise in the SWIFT arena proved
invaluable. Together with the knowledge about Expersoft´s PM/1
that was gained during the realisation of the AssetLink feed,
the interface was set up in record time.
The project started in late April 2002. In early June the solution
was installed at Alasia Investments. The rest of June was used
to thoroughly test the installation and to set up the customer
specific components. Today Alasia processes about five hundred
messages a day both from the AssetLink feed and from BCV. The
Incentage Middleware runs on a standard desktop PC with Pentium
III processor and 512 MB RAM.
UBS AssetLink Tested
The Incentage Middleware Suite is the only middleware integration
solution that has been successfully tested by UBS. The integration
between the Incentage Middleware Suite and Expersoft´s PM/1 is
one of only four portfolio-management solutions that are officially
recommended by UBS.
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