Canada’s largest privately-owned Asset Manager, established in 1982, uses FundApps’ Shareholding Disclosure service. A multi-boutique firm collectively managing over $59 billion (USD) in assets from offices located across Canada and in New York, Chicago and London, they chose FundApps due to the community aspect of our platform and the comprehensive level of client support that we provide.
Since using FundApps’ Shareholding Disclosure service the risk of us missing a filing has been significantly reduced.
Head of Portfolio Compliance, Canadian Asset Manager (US$59 Billion AuM)
The Challenge
Our client’s shift to global trading in 2014 led them to look for an automated and integrated Shareholding Disclosure solution. Prior to using FundApps, they relied on a manual process which consisted of their team interpreting memos and coding rules into their compliance system.
The process to source the data required for monitoring long, short and takeover panels was very time consuming and so they were looking for a scalable solution which could increase their operational efficiency. Additionally, due to trading in numerous countries, the team struggled to have an understanding of such a wide scope of disclosure rules, leading to an increased risk of rule misinterpretation.
The Solution
All of these challenges and frustrations with their previous processes led our client to look for one centralised, automated solution.
One of the key benefits of FundApps is that the client no longer needed to source regulatory data for their compliance monitoring rules. FundApps provides data from numerous lists of publicly available sources, including 17 Takeover Panel lists, ESMA’s FIRDS database, SEC’s Section 13, global short selling rules and Issuer Limits and Requests. Our Shareholding Disclosure service also includes access to our Global Company Database (GCD), providing one consolidated source of global company information and including data from GLEIF. The database is enriched by our Community with other company-related data, such as issuer limits.
Here at FundApps, we partner with aosphere (an affiliate of Allen & Overy) to create a global repository of over 400 disclosure rules in over 100 jurisdictions. Our in-house team of regulatory experts sources the latest regulatory information required to update and maintain our rules, so our clients don’t need to worry about being experts in the jurisdictions themselves.
“Having all of these rules built into the FundApps platform has made us feel a lot safer, as it has greatly reduced our risk of misinterpreting a rule or reporting limit.”
Community is a key part of the FundApps platform, and this was something that really excited the asset manager. Our Shareholding Disclosure service includes rule commentary and denominator check functionality, providing a forum where users can have discussions around regulatory complexities and best practices. We also hold client conferences and quarterly webinars for our user community to get together.
The Result
Our client was able to get up and running with our automated Shareholding Disclosure service within just 6 months - they started using the service in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic!
Their team has achieved particularly great time savings with their quarterly 13F filings to the SEC. Our service has automated this process for them, reducing the required time from 2-3 days per quarter to just 2-3 hours.
The automated monitoring functionality in our Shareholding Disclosure service has provided the asset manager with much greater visibility into their reporting and all of the data and trends that surround it. With our single, centralised dashboard their team can monitor disclosures across multiple jurisdictions all in one place. The simplicity of our UI meant that it only took a couple of hour-long training sessions for their team to get up and running with the system.
Our client has been particularly impressed by the level of support that FundApps offers them. We have dedicated account managers and a team to provide support around the world. This enables us to respond to any query quickly and keep our average first response time consistently under 1 hour.
