Pioneer Investments implements LatentZero

Pioneer Investments ist implementing LatentZero within a project called GISP, which is "a multi-year project working with various Pioneer business units to develop a standardized global platform for front-office operations including the ability to manage financial instruments and newly created funds by rationalizing the management of corporate data and securities registers".

Amongst the areas being set up is one called PFO (Pioneer Front Office), which takes care of the implementation of LatentZero for order management and investment compliance.

I wonder if the implementation in Germany will work as expected, since this is the first implementation of LatentZero in Germany. And the German investment restrictions are most likely the most complex in the world.

Also, maintaining two rule sets for investment compliance (one for pre-trade in LatentZero and one for post-trade in SimCorp Dimension) can be a massive overhead.

State Street Appointed by Lazard Asset Management to Provide Investment Manager Operations Outsourcing Services

State Street wins this prestigious deal to insource Lazard's investment operations, which includes " trade settlement, portfolio administration, reconciliation, performance composite management, data management and preparation of client reports". I am curious why other back office processes remain at Lazard and why and and where there havedrawn the line...

As a result of this mandate, approximately 70 Lazard employees are expected to transfer to State Street. This remindes me a lot of the SGSS / Pioneer deal in Germany, only that they have outsourced middle and back office completely.

I wonder what kind of implications this has on the German business of Lazard, which still runs V3 in their back office...

Unitech helped European Fund Services in building new IT architecture

This is a very interesting piece of information which highlights the history of the EFS acquisition by Société Générale in 2006 (see mergers & acquisitions consultant CIB Partners) and what has happened behind the scene. There is just one slight error: when SocGen took over EFS there was already a very powerful architecture in place in Luxembourg, which was one of the major reasons for the takeover (see also my other post here).

Roundtable On Transfer Agency Strategies in Europe - Update

This "Transfer Agency Roundtable" discussion (of June 2006) shows the strategies of Société Générale and BNP Paribas on TA (also including Citi, Axa, UBS and Titanium Capital) in Europe. Seems SocGen had found a satisfying solution in acquiring European Fund Services S.A. (a TA services provider and outsourcer, and a company I helped building from 2000-2004) in Luxembourg. In the meantime, EFS has migrated all Pioneer customers onto its platform (IGEFI MultiFonds Transfer Agency) and is currently planning to implement a new platform in the anglo-saxon market.

Société Générale Security Services kauft Fondsadministration von Pioneer Investments

Heute ist es öffentlich: die Übernahme der Fondsadministration (Englisch, hier in Deutsch) der Pioneer Investments Kapitalanlage mbH der Security Service Tochter der SocGen. Der neue Name soll wohl "Société Générale Security Services" bleiben (der Name Euro-VL wurde nicht mehr erwähnt). Angeblich sollen etwa 170 Mitarbeiter übernommen werden.

Die spannendste Frage für mich ist: bleiben die Fonds nun auf Simcorp, oder werden sie auf die strategische Plattform der SocGen, GP3, migriert. Nachdem eben erst die Migration von V3 auf Simcorp so gut wie abgeschlossen wurde, wird das wohl eine schwierige Entscheidung.