Multi-national insurance company enhances portfolio risk and analytics capabilities for portfolio managers

Client Profile

The investments division of a large multi-national insurance company with approximately $95 billion assets under management with investments spanning across all major public and private asset classes. The client manages liabilities across multiple insurance segments inclusive of Life, Annuities, and Property & Casualty.

Business Situation

The client uses several prominent vendor technologies to manage their portfolio, including Blackrock Aladdin, eFront, and Eagle PACE. The data produced from core operating systems is centralized within a proprietary database and managed by a central data team, however the reporting function is siloed across numerous business functions causing inconsistencies in how data is interpreted and reported to downstream consumers. The process for business users to develop and produce reports was manual and lacked standardization as it relates to common aggregation and calculation methodologies. To overcome challenges with inconsistent data outputs and delays in producing reports, the client sought to develop an internal Analytics Data Warehouse that would move common logic upstream from the reporting layer to the database layer. To achieve this objective, the client evaluated their resourcing needs and identified a gap in expertise able to combine both the business and technical aspects of the initiative. As such, the client engaged Grandview to lead business analysis, data analysis, and overall architecture of the target solution.

Grandview’s Role

Grandview was engaged to provide their expertise in portfolio risk and performance from both a business and technical perspective. We began the project by evaluating current state reporting processes, building an inventory of reports, limitations, and pain points, and recommending the roadmap and priorities to migrate legacy reports to the new framework. The project required a deep level of technical skill to analyze existing data structures, stored procedures, and complex MS Excel workbooks that contained embedded logic. Additionally, Grandview provided their expertise with managing investment-specific data including positions,transactions, performance, benchmarks, and risk calculations which allowed us to quickly deploy solutions without a middleman between the business and technology teams.

Business Results

• Saved client over 1000 hours of manual processing time per year by automating daily job schedules. Increased frequency of weekly and monthly reports to daily.

• Established standard data hierarchies, bucketing schemes, and aggregation methodologies for positions, benchmarks, performance, risk, and attribution. Drove adoption of the updated methodologies across portfolio managers, sector desks, risk teams, and operations personnel.

• Created table-driven solutions that allow for business user configuration versus I.T. code changes. Increased flexibility to expand reporting capabilities without increasing staff.

• Created a modularized reporting service that provided self-serve user access without the need to understand complex business logic and calculations.