Charles River Development (Charles River), an award-winning provider of financial software and services to the global investment management community, today announced that in 2008 three additional South African financial institutions selected the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) to automate their front to middle office operations: Prudential Portfolio Managers (Prudential), ABSA Capital (ABSA), and Sanlam Prime Services (SPS).
These firms join STANLIB Asset Management (STANLIB) and Metropolitan Asset Management (Metropolitan) and expand Charles River's South African client base to five buy-side firms.
"Charles River is pleased to partner with some of the top institutions in South Africa," says Jon Steward, Managing Director, EMEA, Charles River Development. "Our system has proven interfaces with local South African vendors and serves the market's unique requirements, including the country's bond data challenges, trade distribution requirements and account modeling."
Prudential has $US10 billion in assets under management and selected Charles River IMS to replace two existing and disparate front office solutions. The firm required a cross-asset system that could handle complex fixed income instruments, automate its pre- and post-trade compliance processes and support the firm's growth plans.
ABSA Capital, representing approx 30% of South Africa's unit trust custody market, is currently implementing Charles River Compliance to automate compliance checks across all accounts and support the firm's growth plans.
SPS, a prime brokerage business and wholly-owned subsidiary of Sanlam Capital Markets, was the first prime broker to implement Charles River IMS. The first phase of the project leveraged the system to increase trading efficiency and operational transparency for the SIM's GenX Statistical Arbitrage Hedge Fund.
STANLIB, South Africa's third-largest investment manager with US$41.4 billion of assets under management, selected Charles River IMS in 2007 to automate the investment management of its segregated and pooled fund operations for all asset classes and to comply with client mandates.
Metropolitan, a leading fund manager, has used Charles River IMS since 2006 to automate its trade workflow across all asset classes. Metropolitan selected Charles River IMS for its flexibility and comprehensive functionality, including portfolio modeling scenarios, robust compliance tools, and FIX capabilities.
"South Africa has recently seen an increase in cross border trading," says Steward. "Monitoring compliance and automating trade operations are central to ensuring the smooth evolution of the market. Charles River IMS offers asset managers technology that is essential for growth on the international stage, as well as the flexibility to comply with any local or international regulation or client mandate."
In EMEA, Charles River has regional offices in London and Paris, a local presence in Frankfurt, sales and service partners in South Africa and Dubai and supports nearly 75 buy-side clients in 14 countries.