With roots dating back to 1982, Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group is one of Canada’s largest privately owned asset management firms, collectively managing over $118 billion in assets from offices across Canada, the US, UK and India.
We appreciate FundApps' responsiveness and proactiveness, which we don't always see with vendors... them being so open to improving and changing their systems, and then being able to do that and make changes quickly... Having that open dialogue with a variety of people within the organisation is very much appreciated from myself and the team.
Adam Gartland, Head of Portfolio Compliance, on the sponsorship process
The Challenge
When Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group’s (CCLFG) data provider announced that it would be suspending its automated short disclosures service in Australia, it presented the team with a problem. The Australian Securities & Investments Council (ASIC) requires disclosure reports to be sent via FIX protocol. Moreover, short positions are reportable every day the position exceeds the disclosure threshold of 0.01%.
Without automation, that meant the CCLFG team would have to make thousands of disclosures every year by copying and pasting figures and refining files for submission. The team recognised it was “manual and cumbersome” and “prone to risk.”
The Solution
The sunsetting of a well-known data service by a large data provider presented a unique opportunity for FundApps and CCLFG - a FundApps client since 2019 - to work together on a solution via a product sponsorship arrangement. The solution created was FundApps Filing Manager.
FundApps provided product, engineering, and business development team expertise to build a service capable of addressing the needs of the business with CCLFG providing crucial client access and feedback. As part of the beta project, CCLFG notified FundApps if anything was off during the disclosure process, FundApps remediated, and no return to a manual process was needed. Roughly 100 days after project kickoff, the first filing went into production. From there, several clients were quickly using the service within days.
Matthew Mak, CCLFG, Director of Information Systems, called the project management communication from FundApps the most impressive he’d seen.
For instance, when doing a system upgrade, I received 5 to 7 emails. It was almost like a play-by-play status update, which was great, right. And I actually use that as a sort of internal piece of discussion within my team to talk about change management and what it could look like.
Filing Manager works by using client-provided data to identify short positions for disclosure and prepare the same disclosures for submission to the appropriate regulator. Clients are then able to make their filings from within the service, using the platform’s One Click Disclosure feature. Filing Manager currently supports some of the most actively shorted-in jurisdictions globally, including Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, the United Kingdom and more. Regulatory changes and proposed rules like US Short Selling (13f-2) demonstrate a desire by governing bodies to increase transparency within short markets globally.
The Result
The implementation and use of the Filing Manager service by CCLFG has not only led to a reduction in risk but also enhanced resource efficiency. The automation of the administrative burden of filing disclosures one-by-one has saved the team at CCLFG roughly 7 hours a week, “creating the capacity for value-added work” according to Adam Gartland, Head of Portfolio Compliance. “You can actually focus on the analysis part of things more.”
Typically, filing in multiple jurisdictions requires the contracting of multiple vendors. Compliance monitoring and reporting with FundApps enabled the team at CCLFG to do it with one.
We could have gone back to our old provider. But that requires another file to be created, another system to manage, another contract. So I would say that is a benefit to us too. All of this is being done within one integrated system. The legendary end-to-end process.
Adam Gartland, Head of Portfolio Compliance
Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group ($118 Billion AuM)
