Jane Hilkjær Lauridsen
Senior Vice President, Global Head of Platforms & Operations, Danske Bank A/S, Wealth Management
Connect with Jane on LinkedInRead the article and learn about:
- Understanding the value of data and how to apply it
- Why disparate systems hinder value creation
- Cross-collaboration for better and more relevant solutions
- Building sustainable
As Global Head of Platforms and Operations in the Asset Management business of the Danske Bank Wealth Management division, my main focus is to continuously offer our customers new innovative and robust solutions, while ensuring they and the bank stay compliant with current legislation. While bringing forward new solutions, we must ensure to make the financial markets accessible to all investors on a robust, structured, and scalable foundation. Succeeding with these endeavors takes motivated employees and collaboration – internally between and within our teams, and externally with our customers, partners, vendors, and peers. Without motivated employees and true and open-minded cross-collaboration, we will not succeed with continually innovating the relevant solutions that will help society, customers, and us meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Understanding the value of data and how to apply it
The biggest challenge facing the asset management industry is data: the increasing volumes of data, the cost of managing data, and, perhaps most of all, the ability to utilize that data in an efficient and meaningful way. To enable data value, you need to enable the data to travel up- and downstream through your organization’s value chain at high speed and in a precise, consistent, and transparent way.
Asset management operations is not only about calculating and delivering an IBOR. Asset management operations is about ensuring and delivering the right data consistently by help of robust and lean processing, from the beginning of the value chain and all the way through it. This means reapplying the same data consistently across the value chain although for different purposes.
Disparate systems hinder data value creation
Customers expect full data consistency and transparency in the solutions we offer – as they need it in real-time. Without seamless processing in all parts of the value chain that will not happen. Hence, we have to make data travel with STP and consistently across systems and processes, and we need to refine it and report on it in terms of performance and AUM at any time and in terms of any customer.
Lack of data discipline, disintegrated systems, and operational platforms, as well as legacy technology form a challenge to many players of in the asset management community. Some have chosen best-of-breed platforms, which has proved not to be a viable solution. For many, this has led to endless amounts of reconciliations and oversight; calling for increased investments in administration rather than investment capabilities.
Simplifying operational platforms and models creates higher value
The asset management industry will be looking for more simple platforms and operating models with increased straight through processing and a lower cost to serve. Asset management firms will increasingly distinguish between allocating resources to invest in activities that that are core and those that are not, pointing investments in the direction of processes that are core to the respective asset manager’s business model. Increasingly, asset managers will look for partnerships that deliver strong value propositions at reduced operating cost.
Asset managers will be likely to look for solid Data Warehouse solutions with full data integration into their front-to-back platform, in order to enable more STP and less need for reconciliation and oversight.
Getting up to speed with modern technology while staying compliant
The asset management industry has been a laggard with regard to adapting to modern and efficient technology and processes and applying it across its stakeholder universe. As a result, the cost to serve is too high. These years, operations is all about optimization and ensuring new data management capabilities in support of a more robust and scalable business, while providing for compliance with the extensive new regulation that has been introduced following the financial crisis. The overall focus will be on data and data processing at high speed.
Globally, we see asset managers buying operational capabilities from service providers, who apply new technologies for selected processes, e.g. machine learning for handling unstructured data. However, leveraging these services is only possible if you are fully in control of your data. This trend has not yet fully settled in Scandinavia, but is likely to do so as and when the community succeeds in modernizing data management processes and systems. At that point, partnerships on on a variety of activities may very well end up being the preferred choice, in order to allow asset managers to focus on their core investment management capabilities.
