Custody Risk European Awards 2013: Asset Servicing Technology Vendor of the Year

The judges said, simply, its product “does what it says on the tin.” For those in any doubt, that tin says the most globally deployed investment accounting and tax processing solution, comprehensive in capability, flexible in deployment and proven in production. It has more than 160 clients, with nearly 8,000 users of the solution based in over 30 countries worldwide. It has been at the heart of investment operations for over 25 years and, through continuous research and development, is a contemporary solution for today’s investment operations challenges. Now a four-times consecutive winner in the Asset Servicing Technology Vendor of the Year category – for HiPortfolio – the victor is again DST Global Solutions.

HiPortfolio is a multi-currency investment accounting and asset-servicing application. One major custodian client says it has deployed HiPortfolio on projects that have enabled better control of the integration of fund accounting processes, development of capabilities to deal with negative rates and yields on fixed-income products, and investigations into streamlining income and capital events processing on a global basis.

Other clients praise the software for its flexible and highly configurable nature, its ability to handle large volumes and the contribution it has made to lowering operational costs and reducing risk by eliminating manual processes.

With operations budgets still facing severe pressure at asset servicers, there is a continuous drive for organisations to support existing and new clients with increasingly efficient operations built on solid core platforms. During 2012–2013, DST executed a strategy to deliver operational improvements to clients by: introducing or improving automation and control across business processes; positioning clients to support new mandates and instrument/fund types; enabling clients to launch new services and enter new markets; and supporting clients in dealing with new regulation and reporting requirements.

Major technological changes implemented in the past 12 months include:

• A data integration framework to allow the transformation, validation and enrichment of both incoming and outgoing data, while minimising risk and cost typically introduced when changes to standard formats are involved.
• Investment in developing HiPortfolio’s business intelligence capability, which enables the creation and maintenance of bespoke and flexible dashboards to both visualise and interact with investment, accounting and tax data in a single view.
• During 2012–2013, DST implemented major upgrades to its agile development methodology to improve its velocity to deliver functional and technical changes to clients.

DST has a research and development target spend of approximately 26% of revenue, which included some 18,000 days of effort devoted to asset-servicing solutions during 2012–2013. Its development centres in Australia and Thailand comprise over 110 staff dedicated to developing its asset servicing and investment accounting solutions.

DST also recently launched a technical advisory board to obtain input from senior IT executives within leading financial institutions to optimise its technology investment in HiPortfolio.

Geoff Harries, global head of asset servicing for DST Global Solutions comments: “Winning this prestigious award for the fourth year in a row tells us we’re achieving real success in helping asset servicers respond to today’s challenges and preparing them for future growth. HiPortfolio has yet again proven itself as a contemporary solution supporting investment operations and business growth by focusing on optimising investment operations and delivering operational efficiency.”

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