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Client Situation
One of the top financial institutions in the United States, a
First Rate Investment Systems client, came to
First Rate’s
Consulting team with some special reporting
needs. Its retirement services group, which is responsible for the
client reporting for 1,000 retirement plans, needed to overhaul
its reporting process so that it would be consistent and less
cumbersome.
Like approximately 50 percent of U.S. investment advisors, this
group employed a manual process for preparing quarterly
presentations for fund returns; plan strategy, and allocation
information. Prior to engaging the First Rate Consulting team, the
relationship managers within the retirement services organization,
each had their own method and schedule for creating reports and
presentations for their retirement fund clients. These were
manually developed with spreadsheet templates. The group realized
their report creation process was difficult to manage, time
consuming, and error prone – with the volume of portfolios they
managed increasing to more than 1,000 accounts, with total asset
values in excess of almost $10 billion.
Although many departments across the financial institution had
implemented
First Rate Performance® as their performance
reporting solution, this group had not deployed the First Rate
solution for their portfolios.
The Solution
Since the financial institution was already a current user of
First Rate Performance, the First Rate Consulting action was to
implement the software solution for the retirement services group,
then create a reporting process that would be efficient and meet
the group’s specific needs.
The First Rate Consulting team proceeded to develop the best
combination of reporting and presentations that would be
efficient, informational, consistent, and supportable across a
large account base. First Rate Consulting worked with the
retirement services group to gather all of the historical account
holdings, previously calculated rates of return, and benchmark and
investment style information. Next, the First
Rate Consulting team consolidated all of the data into new custom
tables they built, and added the data to the First Rate
Performance database. In addition, First
Rate developed a customized solution to interface external
security-level characteristics data from MicroPal® to enhance the
presentations available to the retirement services group. The
First Rate team also assisted the client to design dynamic,
“boardroom quality” presentations that portray plan
diversification, historical allocation changes and fund returns.
Now these retirement services professionals can easily create a
client-specific ”boardroom quality” presentation in as few as
three clicks, within a matter of minutes, from their intranet.
These report packages have a title page, summarized cash flows,
fund performance, historical allocation, plus plan diversification
and fund fact sheets using current and historical information.
The Results
The retirement services team is extremely satisfied now that they
no longer create presentations manually. Because of First Rate
Consulting’s customization efforts, this retirement services group
is now able to:
•Use a standard reporting process that reports portfolio-specific
returns on client statements.
•Provide clients with reliable rate of return calculations audited
in a timely fashion.
•Use a standardized reporting process to create personalized
client presentations.
•Create client presentations in a timely manner. Moving from
random monthly, quarterly and annual statements, the data is now
ready by the tenth business day for retirement services
professionals to begin pulling statements for the previous month
end, quarter end or previous plan year end.
•Produce a complete client presentation, customized to the
specific needs of each client, with three clicks of the mouse
•Increase the efficiency of the portfolio managers and support
staff in terms of man-hours saved and increase significantly the
accuracy of the report content. |
