Founded in 1999, MEAG is a major asset management force in the European financial sector and the asset manager for Munich Re and ERGO. One of the tasks when spinning off the new company from Munich Re and ERGO and creating MEAG was to replace the legacy systems that existed before MEAG became a separate entity. The idea was to enlist a new portfolio management solution that was based on the latest technology to achieve a high degree of operational efficiency. SimCorp’s portfolio management system was chosen as one of the main pillars of the new system architecture.
Hear from Claudio-Peter Prutz, Head of Digital Business Services and Organizational Development, MEAG, a major asset management force in the European financial sector, about the operational efficiencies of consolidation and an integrated front office.
At that time, going live with a new organization and meeting the demands for a competitive time to market were the main challenges. The time pressure meant that the full scope of the business architecture had to be developed over time. Therefore, the system had to offer a tremendous amount of flexibility to be able to phase in new functionality, while ensuring that critical business processes continued running. The original SimCorp solution offered what we today call the investment book of record (IBOR), the platform foundation for MEAG’s portfolio managers, which was far more than the previous legacy systems had offered.
“The Green Field approach helped us stay focused on the future platform rather than dwelling on the past legacy state. The flexibility of the SimCorp solution enabled us to achieve our goals and deadlines”, explains Claudio-Peter Prutz, Head of Digital Business Services and Organizational Development, while adding that “SimCorp gave us the opportunity to build our platform as we saw fit for our business. They took a best-practice-based, yet customizable, approach to the implementation process. The team working with us were qualified, dependable consultants and developers, collaborating with us to determine realistic goals and appropriate decision criteria throughout the execution.”
At MEAG, the IT platform has always been approached from an efficiency perspective. It is about tackling the required functionality and data with minimum complexity and number of interfaces, while keeping the highest level of scale and ability to conform to future business directives. “Today, we call it a single platform approach, but even back then, we had an overall IBOR-approach in mind,” says Claudio-Peter Prutz, Head of Digital Business Services and Organizational Development. Among the continuous expansions of functionality during the past years, a major effort was the integration of fund accounting functionality in 2005, which was not part of the initial scope due to separation of the accounting process from the investment process.
The last major operational platform initiative at MEAG entailed the renovation of their entire front office setup. “My vision for MEAG’s future use of SimCorp Dimension is 100% seamless STP from portfolio optimization to accounting. After optimizing the portfolio creation and making the pre-compliance check, orders will automatically be generated, sent to the trading platforms, best executed, confirmed, settled, and booked,” explains Claudio-Peter Prutz, Head of Digital Business Services and Organizational Development, MEAG. To move towards this vision, we needed a best-in-class front office solution. It was natural to investigate whether SimCorp’s new Front Office Suite would meet our needs since we already had the SimCorp Dimension system in place including its original portfolio management solution.”