Investment funds and asset management firms are continually facing a challenging combination of market volatility, downward pressure on commission income, and increased compliance burden.

IT teams are working to meet these requirements while staying alert, limiting opportunities for improvement and innovation. As a result, this situation prevents savings, increases operational risks, and exposes businesses to disruptions caused by more agile competitors. In this new article, let's see why automation can help you make investment decisions.

Automation: for what?

The establishment of a capacity or a center of excellence around the automation of processes and low-code applications allows asset management companies and fund administrators in particular to:

• Transformer quickly daily operations in a reproducible manner
• Improve visibility of case management and efficiency bottlenecks
• Create audit trails for critical compliance processes
• Orchestrate data between systems and manage end-to-end processes

What tasks should be automated?

Many essential daily tasks and processes can be automated in investment management. In particular, but not exclusively:

• Document review and validations
• The closing of the operation
• Setting up the instrument
• Customer onboarding and fund transfers
• Fund accounting and monitoring of fees and reports
• Cash positions and capital activity monitoring

Automating processes such as those listed above can allow asset managers and investment managers to gain speed and precision in data processing tasks. The result is an opportunity to focus on a wider range of activities where human expertise and creative thinking can provide greater added value.

Assistance throughout the investment process

The other traditional aspects of investment banking that can benefit from automation are multiple.

When evaluating data to make investment recommendations, investment bankers look at a myriad of information, from financial data to industry perspectives, in order to predict future business performance and stock prices.

Automating data collection in the context of the this research is thus of great help, because the applications process vast amounts of data coming from multiple sources, Clean them and Prepare them for analysis. This data can then be used to build, and even update automatically, financial models.

Automated algorithms can also provide information on portfolio diversification and identify optimization opportunities by automating the calculation of performance measures and risk assessment. Investment managers are thus assured of having the right information at their disposal to make informed decisions on their clients' investments.

Another essential mission in the world of investment that can be optimized through automation: portfolio management. Indeed, it significantly speeds up a process that involves a lot of time-consuming manual tasks, such as data aggregation and analysis, portfolio rebalancing, and reporting.

Automating transaction reconciliation allows transactions to be matched with transaction conformations, account statements, and settlement records, thus reducing the risks and guaranteeing accurate reporting and in line with investment guidelines and customer satisfaction.

Risk management in the context of portfolio management is also greatly promoted by applications that can integrate risk analysis and scenario modeling. Automating stress testing and value-at-risk (VaR) analysis makes it possible to proactively manage risks and make informed decisions about client portfolios.

The benefits of automating investment management

• Direct productivity gains

Automating manual processes, such as data entry, report generation, and document verification, allows more tasks to be completed without human intervention. Your employees can therefore engage in tasks with higher added value without fear of being overloaded or making mistakes. As a result, the organization can evolve without the need to hire additional staff.

• A reduction in processing times

Investment banking deals with large volumes of information, and even big data, which is complex data sets that would be incredibly difficult for humans to process in their raw, unstructured form. Automating data management processes makes it possible to gain speed and accuracy, while minimizing the risk of error.

• Increased employee satisfaction

It's no secret that investment bankers have exhausting hours. These hours are often spent on labour-intensive tasks, such as aggregating and cleaning disparate data to prepare it for analysis. Automating these time-consuming processes then gives more time to focus on problem solving and personal customer interactions, which is more satisfying for your employees and brings more value to your organization.

About StoryShaper:

StoryShaper is an innovative start-up that supports its customers in defining their digital strategy and the development of automation solutions tailor-made.

Sources: StoryShaper, Bizagi.