You’d think standardisation would make reporting easier. But the EMT, EPT, and all the other regulatory reporting requirements you have to contend with as an asset manager have led to the complete opposite.
If anything, putting reports together in the correct format is becoming increasingly challenging. And it’s primarily down to the way data is gathered, managed, and stored
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. With the right technology in place, you can create complete, accurate, and compliant reports quickly, without the attendant frustration.
Here’s how.
Out of control
Complying with reporting requirements is challenging to begin with. But, to make matters worse, regulations don’t apply to third party administrators. So, as an asset manager, you’re responsible for the quality and accuracy of data you can’t control.
Far from following a consistent format, data sets can vary widely from one third party administrator to another, even when it comes to terminology. Where one might use ‘daily price’, for instance, another might use ’24-hour price’. And it would be up to you to make sense of these differences.
Your mileage may also vary when it comes to delivery channels. You might receive one third party administrator’s data by email, another might upload it to an FTP site, and another still might use an API.
Needless to say, when you’re receiving five or more of these data sets every 24 hours, trying to collect everything in one place for ease of access is like trying to stop the flow from a burst pipe with a single square of tissue paper (read, next to impossible). And this makes aggregating and consolidating data and compiling compliant reports that much more tedious and time-consuming.
As UBS Wealth Management’s head of client analytics David Blackwell notes, without a centralised repository of data — or golden source — “…as much as 70% of analysts’ time can be spent on managing raw data, cleaning it and preparing it for analysis.”
This leaves precious little bandwidth to put together the actual reports and, more importantly, make sure they’re complete and accurate.
A moving target
The quality of what you receive from third party administrators is only one piece of the puzzle. Alongside that data, PRIIPs, MiFID, ESG, and other regulations also require you to collect huge volumes of static, product, and transaction data.
Case in point, to calculate transaction costs, you have to collect up to four years’ worth of underlying transaction data and portfolio static data. In large firms, that could mean thousands of portfolios and millions of transactions.
The reporting requirements also change constantly.
FinDatEx, the European industry body, reviews and issues new reporting templates every six to twelve months. New templates rarely contain radical changes. But small changes still add up, creating a continuous learning curve that adds further time to an already lengthy process.
More significantly, the issues don’t end when you’ve put your report together. Your data can also change and become inaccurate once it’s gone downstream.
Here again, even though it’s impossible to control data that’s in the hands of third parties, the buck stops with you. Which means you’ll need to invest further time you can’t spare reconciling what you’ve sent to third parties with your internal records.
Putting third party reporting on autopilot
As things stand, we generate data at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. To put that in perspective, 90% of all the data available worldwide today was generated in the past two years.
Yet, when it comes to harnessing that data, asset managers still rely on outdated techniques. And this is making the reporting process more time-consuming and costly than it has to be, and putting you at needless risk.
Fundipedia can help you put an end to laborious reporting processes, save time and money, and reduce the risk that you’ll get into trouble with regulators because of avoidable mistakes.
You can set up Fundipedia so it receives data from multiple sources, including email, FTP, and API. And you can create custom parameters so the system alerts you if there are issues — a report is overdue, for instance, or the data looks odd — and there are multiple escalation points.
Once the data has been verified, our platform populates it into the format you need, whether that’s FinDatEx, OpenFunds, or FundsXML. It then sends it downstream through FTP or API and reconciles it automatically to make sure it’s accurate.
Our team is always on hand to offer guidance and support. But, best of all, we update our platform regularly so it adapts automatically to any reporting rule changes. Which means your staff don’t have to spend time getting their heads around new templates and requirements.
When it comes to reporting, don’t leave compliance to chance
A fifth of fund managers make reporting mistakes. So if you think it won’t happen to you, think again.
As compliance consultant and former FCA regulator Nick Bayley puts it: “The sheer complexity of… reporting requirements means that virtually no one is getting it completely right.“
With Fundipedia, you no longer need to do things manually and risk making costly mistakes. Our platform will collect data from third party administrators, verify its accuracy, and pull out the data you need so you can easily compile reports, send them downstream, and easily carry out reconciliations.
Why chance it, when you can get the job done accurately in just a few clicks?
Learn how Fundipedia can help you create complete, accurate, compliant reports quickly, with none of the effort.