Equinox Capital Management Ltd, a leading UK-based discretionary manager and promoter of hedge funds, has successfully implemented eagleye, a global compliance solution from Misys Eagleye and Microsoft, in its front and middle offices. It has achieved a return on its investment on the licence in just two months and expects ROI on the implementation within six months.
Eagleye is enabling Equinox to model investment strategies across all asset classes while its strategy is automatically checked for potential breaches of local and global regulatory requirements. The .NET-based solution, which has a familiar Microsoft look and feel, also allows Equinox`s risk managers to ensure pre- and post-trade compliance. The entire investment process at Equinox has been refined and streamlined as a result of the implementation and the company has been able to reduce operating costs by 10%.
Equinox is currently in the post-implementation phase. During this stage the company aims to integrate every fund in which it will invest into a single Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, completely replacing its existing Oracle database. This will offer greater transparency and ease of reporting for Equinox and greater flexibility to offer investors customised reports. In addition, Equinox expects to reduce total cost of ownership support costs by 10%.
Eagleye also enables Equinox`s back-office administration staff to record the profit/loss on each trade and each account and allows them to produce accurate end of month client reports more swiftly.
All compliance rules including those relating to asset allocation, exposure, inclusion/exclusion, credit rating, leverage and absolute amounts have been specified for the system so that Equinox risk managers can guarantee that each trade meets statutory, corporate and client-specific compliance criteria. If any breaches of these compliance rules are about to occur, real-time warnings and alerts are issued by the system and a transparent, detailed audit trail is created which allows risk managers, fund managers or traders to pin-point the precise reason for those potential breaches.
Philip Brown, Head of IT, Equinox, says: "Misys Eagleye has met all our requirements for an integrated, future-proofed compliance system which could leverage our existing Microsoft infrastructure and be accessible from remote locations. It is capable of handling high volumes of trades a day and has a sophisticated centralised database which allows our users to generate client reports and documentation. Eagleye is certainly proving itself as a cost-effective and speedy solution to implement, manage and maintain and this should increase our profit margins."
Stephen Oxenbridge, Managing Director, Misys Eagleye, said: "It is essential that companies such as Equinox can demonstrate to regulators and investors that they have acted in the best interests of investors at every stage in the investment, trading and settlement process. We are delighted that Equinox has chosen eagleye as their global compliance solution to prove this capability."
Paul Shetler, Industry Manager for Financial Services, Microsoft EMEA, said: ".NET has enabled Misys to develop eagleye as a highly scalable and flexible compliance system which means that in the future Equinox can roll it out across many different funds in a fund of funds structure while still maintaining levels of transparency, control and detailed audit trails."
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