Major Mutual Fund Company Sees a 70% Time-to-Market Improvement with Data Automation
Summary:
Synthesis won a RFP competition from a major mutual fund company seeking a data automation solution. This organization had found itself spending up to five person-weeks every month collecting spreadsheet and PDF-based data from a wide variety of fund management companies and hand-coding it into formats suitable for their database facilities. The goal of the RFP was to find a vendor capable of automating this extremely diverse flow of information.
The Opportunity:
The requirements called for validating, cleaning, and loading a large number of data source files of different types and formats. The large number of files from disparate sources made the process and workflow all that more difficult to manage and streamline. In addition, the client required the vendor to output a clean, publish-ready data file for website publishing.
The Solution:
Because this situation is not atypical within the financial services sector, Synthesis was already equipped with an appropriate and extensive set of tools capable of importing such raw data as XML, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, CSV files, database .tar and .bk files, webpages, e-mails, and third party feeds (i.e., Vestec, Bysis, StateStreet, Lipper, Morningstar, FundStation).
The Marketing Content Solution solution Synthesis deployed to support this project is currently handling more than 65 source files in Excel format, plus e-mail and website data feeds. Each month, the client provides the set of source data files to the Synthesis team and, within a few hours, 100% of the data is loaded, validated and ready for client review.
The Results
Once the data loading is finalized, the system builds the data files particular to the website database and transfers the data in a ready-to-load format to the website database team. The results of this implementation are a 80% reduction in client labor and a 70% improvement in time to market for the data.
This solution scenario and result is typical of many Synthesis Technology clients. Even those with more organized data infrastructures often find themselves struggling with the reporting side (marketing and client communications) use of the data. Synthesis suite of products and services are often the key to reducing the problems and risks associated with financial data aggregation and reporting.
