While still in the process of implementing, and six months away from going live, they shared some insights about their selection process, desire to consolidate and how their implementation project has gone to-date.
Belfius Bank is among the top four leading banks in Belgium and serves approximately 3.5 million customers, offering commercial activities in three main fields: retail and commercial banking, the public and corporate sector, financial services and insurance. Jo De Mil is Senior Product Manager at Belfius Bank, responsible for the development of investment products and discretionary portfolio mandates for the private banking clients of Belfius Bank and initiated and carried out the selection process having identified the need for a portfolio management system.
Selecting a new platform
For years, Belfius Bank had been struggling with an outdated proprietary technology that had too many manual processes and integration points. Rather than building themselves, they wanted to prevent any future limitations to them running a streamlined front office operation.
Based on the way Belfius Bank handle asset allocation, factoring performance and risk calculations into their investment decisions for clients, having straight-through processing (STP) capability was important to them. At the outset, Belfius Bank was clear that the fewer interfaces they had to deal with, the better. According to Jo, SimCorp Dimension offered Belfius Bank a single view into the full trade lifecycle and enhanced their portfolio rebalancing capability.
Belfius Bank had internal custodial and compliance functions but they needed a front-end solution. “We really needed a solution that allowed for an end-to-end approach,” states Jo. “SimCorp Dimension’s front office and investment book of record (IBOR) was perfect to have one vendor bringing all components together. By not having multiple systems to interface, we are able to go live much faster than if we needed to connect different systems together. Multiple implementations and multiple integrations would have led to a real operational headache, so I’m glad we found a vendor that could offer everything our front office needed. We not only saved on time, but also the potential for future risks associated with running multiple systems,” explained Jo.