Charles River Development (Charles River), a front- and middle-office investment software solutions provider, today announced that Fifth Third Asset Management (FTAM), has implemented the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS), supporting 50 FTAM users across its asset management operations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Minneapolis, Minnesota.
FTAM also leverages the Charles River Network for real-time, global electronic trading via FIX (Financial Information eXchange). The project was delivered on-budget and accomplished FTAM's primary strategy of consolidating all of its asset management clients onto one trading platform with integrated pre- and post-trade compliance management.
Fifth Third Asset Management is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fifth Third Bank with over $18.6 billion in domestic equity, domestic fixed income, and international equity assets under management. FTAM provides comprehensive advisory services through a collection of distinctive investment teams, backed by centralized operations functions, with a focus on risk management. FTAM offers an innovative asset management product line utilizing, mutual funds and separate accounts for retail and individual investors.
"Charles River IMS has allowed our portfolio managers and traders to design very efficient workflows," said Stephen Hedger, Managing Director of Trading and Operations, FTAM. "These efficient workflows allow our professionals to easily implement their investment strategies while taking advantage of third-party data sources, such as real-time pricing, and efficiently accessing multiple equity and fixed income market venues via Charles River's FIX network."
During the initial phase, Charles River helped centralize and consolidate portfolio management and trading across FTAM's domestic and international equity and fixed income desks under one platform. Working closely with FTAM's internal experts, Charles River's implementation team streamlined the portfolio management and trading process. The team also automated post-trade processing, pre- and post-trade compliance monitoring, and enabled FIX trading through the Charles River Network. The last phase of the implementation added FTAM's Money Market Desks with a full array of SEC 2a7 compliance rules and FTAM internal compliance guidelines.
"Charles River understood and met our needs for mission-critical functionality across asset classes, investment styles, and our geographic locations," says Hedger. "We've saved time over maintaining multiple applications and have significantly reduced our risk. Our portfolio managers and traders now have complete and robust audit trails that display the entire life of the order."
Charles River accelerated the implementation by delivering tested and certified interfaces for eight of FTAM's data and back-office providers. According to Hedger, "These interfaces, along with Charles River's robust security asset master file configuration, ensure that we can establish securities real-time and further enrich multiple security types, including derivatives and complex fixed income instruments."
Charles River's implementation team also created direct FIX connections on the Charles River Network for 27 of FTAM's equity brokers, as well as its three fixed income direct market access venues.
"We help clients like FTAM drive investment decisions and trading strategies by bringing streaming pricing and real-time data directly into the Charles River Manager Workbench and Charles River Trader Blotter," said Tom Driscoll, Managing Director, Global, Charles River Development. "We have interfaces with major data providers and over 500 third-party trade and liquidity venues. Clients can also integrate quickly with additional execution venues via FIX, as well as other systems through Message-based APIs and exposed Web services."