Geneva Workflow Manager Accelerates Quintillion’s Growth
Release Date: 09 June 2008
When Dublin-based fund administrator Quintillion Ltd. opened its doors in late 2006, the founders spent little time debating over the right technology platform to meet their fund accounting needs. They went with the industry’s leading global portfolio management and accounting solution, Advent Geneva. "We all had a number of years of experience with Geneva,®" says Chief Information Officer Charles Gillanders. "We liked the platform. We were comfortable with it, and we knew we could find qualified staff who were very experienced with the platform, which would reduce our initial training costs and get us going faster."
It helped as well that Geneva enjoys a leadership reputation among hedge fund managers. "I think we would have had a much harder job convincing clients to come with a start-up," Mr. Gillanders says, "But to be able to say clearly that we have both Geneva and folks who know the software inside and out, that’s a definite win for us."
How quickly has Quintillion been able to establish itself in a competitive marketplace? After just 14 months in business with 30 staff members, the firm has $4.5 billion in assets under administration. In addition, the firm was named "The Best of the New Generation of Fund Administrators" by the Hedge Fund Journal awards in 2008.
Workflow Manager: A Built-In Business Accelerator
When Quintillion implemented Geneva, the firm immediately implemented Workflow Manager, which at the time had just recently become a standard feature in the system. Workflow Manager uses pre-built integration "accelerators" that speed the creation of interfaces and streamline the exchange of data between Geneva and other applications, both internal and external.
"I think that the big win in this particular implementation, as far as we’re concerned, has certainly been around Workflow Manager," Mr. Gillanders asserts. "It’s been a building block to extend our infrastructure in any way, shape, or form we want to."
Workflow Manager has enabled Quintillion to increase the amount of automation in its operations, reducing manual intervention, systematic workarounds, and offline processing. "I couldn’t begin to tell you the number of custom interfaces that we have developed in Geneva with Workflow Manager," says Mr. Gillanders. "It is probably on the order of 30 plus. They’re integrating us with our clients, counterparties, and prime brokers alike. Quintillion is also integrating Geneva with tools that they have built internally to do reporting and reconciliations and exception management. Workflow Manager is also being used in setting up security masters and price masters."
Flexible Problem Solving
Taking advantage of Workflow Manager’s flexibility, Quintillion has been able to build highly customized solutions to issues that might otherwise impede the flow of data and business. For example, Mr. Gillanders cites over-thecounter trades, which typically require manual exception handling. "Even if you’ve developed a trade file with a particular client, the first time a new instrument is traded, particularly if it’s OTC, it’s of no use because you don’t have the instrument built on Geneva." As a result, an individual would then be required to sort out the instrument details and create the security master manually.
"We took that whole cycle and said, ‘What can we do to include additional information on the trade file so that when a client sends us an OTC trade, we automatically build the OTC security master file at the same time?’" he recalls. "Using Workflow Manager, we pull in the data to build the master, and then continue loading the trade, so that we get a much more straight through process. It’s never going to be entirely straight through with OTC instruments, but it’s certainly an improvement over a purely manual process. And," he adds, "I don’t think we could have done that were it not for the flexibility that Workflow Manager offers."
Data In, Data Out
Besides creating an environment that enables clients to feed data directly into Geneva, Workflow Manager also gives Quintillion added flexibility in the way it delivers data to clients, according to Mr. Gillanders. "We’ve built our own data warehouse solution," he explains. "We use Workflow Manager to take a dozen or so extracts out of Geneva and transfer them into our warehousing database. And from that we can derive some sophisticated reporting output for clients. Certainly we can provide reports directly from Geneva, but this gives us another level of reporting to enhance and augment the reporting that we provide to clients."
Workflow Manager also enables the firm to provide custom net asset value reporting for each client. "We take about a dozen extracts every NAV reporting period for every single client and drop them in a database. Workflow Manager allows us to do that, and then we can report from that database. So yes, we definitely use Workflow Manager to produce output that we send on to our clients."
New Uses Every Day
Mr. Gillanders encourages both current and prospective users of Geneva to understand all of the functionalities of Workflow Manager. "When you see the Workflow Manager demo, you might think, ‘Well, I can see how that might be useful.’ But until you start using the product itself, that’s when you figure out, ‘I can integrate with third party utilities; I can integrate with my own internal systems; I can integrate with my clients better; and I can use it to get reporting output from the warehouse data.’ That level of customization in Workflow Manager was certainly a surprise to us, and we feel we’ve really taken advantage of that."
He also agrees that Workflow Manager contributes to the overall operational efficiency. "We certainly think that having Geneva, in combination with Workflow Manager and with some of the solutions that we have developed surrounding Geneva and Workflow Manager, we definitely achieve lower operational costs. That combination has been critical to us achieving the goals that we have in our first 14 months with the reasonable staffing that we have in place."
If Geneva has helped Quintillion grow quickly to a competitive position, then Workflow Manager has helped accelerate that growth even more. "All in all, I think we’d be comfortable stating that Workflow Manager has been a critical part of us being able to offer the services we do, in an automated manner."
Certainly, that is just the beginning. "Day in, day out," Mr.Gillanders concludes, "We find more uses for this tool."