ABSA Asset Management Limited, an ABSA group company formed just over a year ago to provide highly focussed professional asset management services to institutional and private investors, has embarked on a R6-million project to facilitate and support its national and international operations.
Announcing the project, ABSA Asset Management managing director Barry Botes says the initiative underscores the company`s drive to establish leadership in one of the most challenging and complex sectors of the financial services market.
"With more than R15-billion in assets already under management, ABSA Asset Management plans significant growth and increased market penetration within the next few years. These objectives depend on the quality of our services based on business initiatives and supporting systems and infrastructure," he says.
The project involves the phased introduction of 40 licences of IDÉE -- a full suite of electronic asset management software tools and systems produced by décalog, a European-based world leader in software solutions for the global asset management industry.
The IDÉE solution will be supplied and supported in South Africa by ensemblé Technology, a company affiliated to Wang Global and a highly specialised solutions organisation in the banking and financial services sector, in association with décalog.
Ettie Takacs, ensemblé CEO, says globalisation is the single most important trend underway in the asset management industry.
"The impact of globalisation can be overwhelming. To succeed, asset management organisations must strive to centralise risk management while at the same time fostering de-centralised decision making. Faced with a potential nightmare when dealing with a great number of internal and external information systems, world-class asset management companies are implementing straight through processing (STP) systems - an industry-acknowledged goal that is provided by IDEÉ," she says.
Botes says that IDÉE was chosen after a rigorous and in-depth investigation of many international products and related site visits.
"Based on our evaluation criteria and methodology we found IDÉE to be a leading product in terms of functionality, focus, flexibility, sophistication and the ability to fully integrate with systems of choice," says Botes.
The full suite of IDÉE software purchased by ABSA Asset Management includes IDÉE Trader, IDÉE Manager, IDÉE Compliance and IDÉE performance. The project will see the integration of the IDÉE solutions into ABSA Asset Management`s back office systems as well as market service providers and custodian services to facilitate and support STP.
IDÉE covers a complete range of investment instruments including equities, bonds, options, futures, swaps, repos and money market instruments as well as stock lending and borrowing.
In partnership with décalog, ensemblé provides the South African financial services market with full IDÉE product support, consultancy, implementation and integration services as a well as a local technical call centre.
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