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	Alasia Investment
	Clariden Bank
	Intesa Sanpaolo
	Maerki Baumann
	Pioneer Investments
	Rüd Blass, Privatbank
	Zurich Financial Services

Connecting the Portfolio Management System to the Depository Banks BCV and UBS using UBS Asset Link

About Alasia Investments SA

Alasia Investments SA is a Lausanne based Asset Manager. With over 350 customer-portfolios to manage, Alasia is a typical, medium sized player. This means that the manual handling of transactions becomes more and more painful. In order to automate the communication with its depository banks, Alasia Investments turned to INCENTAGE.

The Problem

Even thought the type of information being delivered by each depository bank is similar, the way it is structured (syntax) and the meaning (semantics) is very different. The major problem is that each bank defines its own standard which is updated regularly. These release cycles vary in terms of frequency and schedule. As a result, the portfolio management system connected to the banks is under constant pressure for change which worsens the availability of the system.

As the representation of certain business elements varies between depositary banks, so it does also between asset managers. For example an asset manager might introduce his own naming-convention for portfolios, which may differ from the naming of the bank and also from the naming of a fellow asset manager.

The Solution

"We especially appreciated the availability and the speed of analysis and implementation that INCENTAGE showed".

Carmine Salerno, Project Manager at Alasia Investments

With INCENTAGE, the portfolio management system (PMS) gets the information from all banks in one syntax and one semantics. This reduces the complexity considerably. The PMS is not directly exposed to the individual release cycles of the banks anymore. Furthermore, the manufacturer of the PMS can focus on real added value items and thus the asset manager profits from improved responsiveness. Finally, the time required to integrate an additional depository bank is considerably reduced. The modular architecture of an INCENTAGE solution - using loosely coupled components instead of monolithic applications - helped to overcome the second major problem common to this kind of interfaces. A separate, site specific component allows the client to fully participate in all standards updates, since his specific functionality is shielded from the release cycles.

What INCENTAGE did

When Alasia Investments first thought about automating the communication between their PMS system and the depository bank, it turned to its PMS supplier, Expersoft Systems. With the help of INCENTAGE Expersoft had just realised an interface to the UBS AssetLink data feed. So the integration with the AssetLink feed was no problem. More difficult proved the integration of the information from BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise), with which Alasia also had some of its portfolios. There was no off-the-shelf solution available for this feed yet. Here INCENTAGE's long track-record in the securities industry together with its expertise in the SWIFT arena proved invaluable. Together with the knowledge about Expersoft's PM/1 that was gained during the realisation of the AssetLink feed, the interface was set up in record time.

The project started in late April 2002. In early June the solution was installed at Alasia Investments. The rest of June was used to thoroughly test the installation and to set up the customer specific components. Today Alasia processes about five hundred messages a day both from the AssetLink feed and from BCV. The INCENTAGE Middleware runs on a standard desktop PC with Pentium III processor and 512 MB RAM.

UBS AssetLink Tested

The INCENTAGE Middleware Suite is the only middleware integration solution that has been successfully tested by UBS. The integration between the INCENTAGE Middleware Suite and Expersoft's PM/1 is one of only four portfolio-management solutions that are officially recommended by UBS.

For more information please contact us.

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