Bell Tower: A case study for Fund Administration (name changed for confidentiality)
Bell Tower is a firm of lawyers with a substantial private client department providing a range of investment services. For Bell Tower, taking administration of the OEIC in-house was partly for control and partly for quality of service. They wanted to improve the range and timing of reporting to shareholders. But also take control over dramatically increasing outsourcing overheads. With the change in economic climate, cost savings became increasingly relevant, particularly for OEICs below £50m in value.
Brief:
To provide a core system for processing an OEIC including:
- Management of underlying assets of the fund, bulk dealing of shares, dividends and bank accounts.
- Production of valuations on a variety of bases and periods.
- Calculation of equalisation and automatic generation of accrued income.
- Automatic management of the shareholders of the OEIC including issuing and transferring of shares, share certificates and stock transfer forms.
- Links to market data feeds.
- Full accounts production.
Product:
Troika Accounting
Clients Comments:
“When we started investigating the feasibility of change it became clear that software was going to be an important driver. We came to the conclusion that we needed something that was a blend of ‘product’ and specialist development. We’ve known the people who develop Troika Accounting for some time and they have the skills including accounting knowledge.”
By converting historic OEIC data into Troika Accounting, thewealthworks enabled the client to process transactions for a whole year to arrive at true opening positions to reconcile with their previous service provider. This also gave them the comfort of being able to parallel run in a semi-live environment.
“There are relatively few transactions within the OEIC, so running a parallel test wasn’t too onerous. We’ve also been able to satisfy ourselves that we can reproduce the same processes as our legacy service provider and clearly this is a good way to mitigate the risk of change.”
Project Manager, Bell Tower