Challenger Case Study
The Customer
Challenger is a diversified financial services company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. With a contemporary business model that aims to provide products and services to meet a broad range of financial needs, Challenger manages activities that span mortgage management, financial planning, funds management and asset management. Now with assets and loans under management, administration and advice of over $47 billion, Challenger has experienced rapid growth over recent years.
The Challenge
With the growth in Challenger's investment products and customer base within their Funds Management business, the company was increasingly being asked to provide client transaction and investment balance information to Financial Advisors electronically.
Challenger understood that they would need to build, manage and maintain systems and processes to deliver the data in different formats to advisers. While the exact cost and effort in developing and maintaining these different interfaces was difficult to quantify, it was going to be significant. From previous experience, Challenger also recognised that servicing adviser requests for mislaid data and queries would be an ongoing commitment.
Challenger needed a streamlined way to supply data to advisers in whatever format was required by their existing financial planning software at a known charge without the cost of ongoing resources. Hayden King, General Manager of Administration and Operations for Challenger's Funds Management business, had considered a number of different technology solutions. His principal concern was that most lacked robust quality control and reconciliation procedures. Mr King believed InvestmentLink had already resolved many of the issues that some other solutions were yet to even consider.
e-Portfolio has enabled us to provide accurate reconciled data to advisers in an efficient manner, with minimal effort via a single, scalable interface.
- Hayden King, General Manager,
Administration and Operations, Challenger
The Solution
The technology that presented to the desired outcome for Challenger was InvestmentLink's e-Portfolio solution. e-Portfolio offered an affordable method of data delivery with a rigorous weekly reconciliation process, as well as comprehensive data-checking capabilities.
e-Portfolio enabled Challenger to provide advisers with regular, reliable data on their client's investments through a single, scalable interface.
Several of Challenger's team members had worked with InvestmentLink's solution before, which heightened their confidence that it offered the right combination of rigor and flexibility that Challenger required.
"Our previous dealings with InvestmentLink meant that we were familiar with the benefits of e-Portfolio, including robust reconciliation and verification processes." King said.
The switch to e-Portfolio was completed with no downtime to Challenger's business operations because the solution readily integrates with existing technology systems. "e-Portfolio has had minimal impact on our technology and operational processes," King explained. "e-Portfolio was able to integrate with our existing software and in-house technology."
"With InvestmentLink providing the first line of support to all licensees and advisers on any data delivery issues, our people can concentrate on providing first class service in other areas," said Mr King. "With a single daily feed we can service all licensees and advisers without having to concern ourselves with the complexities of the various data formats. This is InvestmentLink's core competency and an area that I am comfortable to leave to the experts."
Business Benefits
The Challenger team's previous experience with e-Portfolio, coupled with the consultation provided by InvestmentLink, assured Challenger it would be able to implement rigorous data checking procedures to ensure the quality of the resulting data feeds, as well as being able to provide its clients with an efficient and professional service.
Through the e-Portfolio service, Challenger is able to provide confirmation of transactions to all advisers within hours of them having been processed, together with a daily valuation of client investments. In addition, because e-Portfolio can handle different data formats, Challenger can now deliver data to all major financial planning software packages via InvestmentLink. With the use of e-Portfolio's automated data transfer capabilities, Challenger has also eliminated the need for manual data handling.
"e-Portfolio has enabled us to provide accurate reconciled data to advisers in an efficient manner. As this is done via a single interface, it is scalable with minimal additional effort," said King. "This is delivering us cost and process efficiencies and will continue to do so in the future as demand and volume increases."
InvestmentLink provided Challenger with a fully transparent ongoing cost of ownership, which factored in regularmaintenance and software upgrades, taking the guess-work out of Challenger's technology budgeting.
With client portfolio data transfer headaches eliminated, Challenger has been able to focus on its core business, confident InvestmentLink is handling all investment advisers' data requests and reconciliations.
Conclusion
In choosing InvestmentLink's e-Portfolio technology, Challenger's Funds Management business has been able to control ongoing technology costs and provide financial advisers with reliable, fully reconciled data for their client's investments.
The flexibility of e-Portfolio is also enabling Challenger to support a wide range of different financial software interfaces, without incurring additional costs.
