Established in 1976, our client is a Chicago-based asset manager with US$123 billion in assets under management. Previously using an on-premise solution, they made the switch to FundApps in 2019 when they realised the time savings that their Compliance and IT teams could achieve with a cloud-based, managed service. Since then they have been using our automated Shareholding Disclosure and Sensitive Industries services.
Switching to FundApps’ robust cloud-based services has enabled us to seamlessly receive regular rule updates and given us the opportunity to focus purely on compliance.
Senior Compliance Officer, Chicago-Based Asset Manager (US$123 Billion AuM)
The Challenge
Our client had been using an on-premise vendor for their regulatory compliance monitoring since 2011. The solution for monitoring sensitive industries was very manual, and while the process for shareholding disclosure was more automated, managing the rule updates was still very time-consuming. The team became frustrated with how resource-heavy this process was, requiring their internal IT team to deploy the changes in a testing environment for the compliance team to review, before making them live in production.
The small nature of the vendor’s business was also a concern for them, as they worried about key-person risk and lacked the support of a dedicated Account Manager.
The Solution
In their search for a cloud-based vendor with a comprehensive support system, our client found FundApps. They chose us due to the ease of which rule updates are uploaded to the FundApps platform, and the transparency given around these updates. Cloud technology enables us to deploy rule changes to the FundApps platform seamlessly, with no work required from our clients. When a rule update is pushed out, users receive a notification with background on the rule change and an option to approve it for use within their environment.
We are strong believers in strength in numbers, and all of our clients use a shared rule-set. This community element of the FundApps platform was something that really excited the asset manager. They are frequent users of our Rule Commentary functionality - a forum where users can ask questions and discuss regulatory complexities and best practices.
Our Shareholding Disclosure service has a detailed results page which the compliance team find really useful for their day-to-day monitoring. In a quick glance, they can see all of the issuers that are impacted by any given rule. The filtering ability also enables them to get more granular should they wish to.
The Result
The support from their dedicated Account Manager, as well as our comprehensive documentation, enabled our client to have a quick and seamless transition on to our Shareholding Disclosure and Sensitive Industry services.
The global nature of our Client Success team and the level of support they provide has particularly impressed the asset manager. With Account Managers based in Europe, North America and APAC, we are able to quickly respond to their queries at any time of day. We work hard to keep our average first response time consistently under 1 hour.
“FundApps has the perfect combination of personalised support from a dedicated Account Manager and a 24/7 ticket system for when you need it.”
Moving to a cloud-based service has enabled their IT team to gain back 1,050 hours a year - time that was previously spent testing and deploying rule changes and performing system upgrades and other maintenance. It’s no wonder that we are described as: “the favourite vendor of our IT department"!
It’s not just time that they’ve saved. Now that they no longer have to host their monitoring solution, our client is saving over $20,000 USD per year in server capacity/datacentre costs.
Being part of a large compliance community has also enabled the compliance team to get a better night’s sleep, knowing they have mitigated the risk of missing a disclosure and subsequently receiving a fine and reputational damage. They take particular comfort in the fact that they can work with other users of the platform to query rule changes and supplement their own knowledge.
Thanks to the FundApps community, we can sleep better at night, knowing that we are working with a wide network of compliance experts whose wealth of experience supplements our own.
Senior Compliance Officer, Chicago-Based Asset Manager (US$123 Billion AuM)
