Reduces Costs & Improves Efficiency

The Securities Financing business unit of one of the largest Prime Brokerage businesses was dealing with an ageing billing system that was slow and error prone, leading to significant inefficiencies of its financial controllers and delayed reporting for its hedge fund clients. Controllers were manually checking the integrity of the billing reports before sending them out to clients. This, coupled with the need to generate close to 30 different billing reports because of their client’s diverse data requirements, resulted in significant productivity losses. Costs were rising and data analysis needed to be improved — a change had to be made.

The Solution

The existing mainframe-based legacy billing application being used to process the billing reports for its clients had been expanded over the years causing speed degradation and data integrity issues. Since this application was critical to the company’s operations, they looked for a vendor with proven expertise in the securities finance business who could address specific issues in the billing and accounting process.
The company tapped AFIServ to develop the new system. AFIServ leveraged its securities financing business experience and its technical capability in re-engineering mission-critical legacy systems to implement an integrated billing system for the company. The new system was faster and automatically checked for data integrity, thus eliminating the need for the financial controllers to do the same. Furthermore, the new system was flexible to meet changing client requirements and provided additional functionality not available with the existing system. AFIServ utilized its extensive technical capabilities in UNIX, C++, Sybase, PERL and scripting to deliver the solution on time and within budget.

Critical Success Factors

AFIServ initiated this solution using its unique Distributed Consulting approach - identifying those resources with the appropriate business and technical knowledge both at the client site and offshore - to shorten the learning curve and take full advantage of the 24-hour development cycle.

A critical success factor for this project was the reliance on the team’s business knowledge - both in securities finance as well as billing and accounting processes. Without this level of experience onshore and offshore, the project would have taken potentially months longer and cost substantially more. AFIServ’s proven domain experience was a key differentiator, freeing the client’s team from educating AFIServ about the business, focusing instead on running their business.

Business Value

The new billing system has resulted in cost reductions, improved approaches for analyzing the data, and delighted end clients. Specifically, the billing process that was taking one week now takes only two days; the checks and safety nets built into the new system have eliminated the need for manual verification of the reports by the financial controllers; and the number of reports that need to be generated to fulfill the specific client needs have been reduced from 30 to just 5. In addition, a number of new features were added to the new system that allows clients to analyze the data in a variety of ways not possible previously. All-in-all the system is saving enormous processing time, and providing new flexibility to demanding clients.