By David Gross
Director and Chief Product Officer
July 4th 2023
Improving client processes, increasing capacity via automation and integration, and reducing risk are key product focus areas – with the principal developments at present centring on our cloud-native dpInvestor transfer agency and investor servicing solution.
Angular expansion
We continued to upgrade our platform to the Angular web application design framework and development technology stack through the second quarter. Angular provides:
- A component-based framework for building scalable web applications.
- A collection of well-integrated libraries that cover a wide variety of features, including routing, forms management and client-server communication.
- A suite of developer tools to help develop, build, test and update application code.
Highlights this quarter include successfully completing transfer of the Side Pocket Module and Business Activity Monitor, which monitors business process flows, to the Angular platform.
Digitisation
We released the latest version of our ETAS portal in Q2. Through ETAS’ multifunctional digital capabilities, investors and related parties can obtain real-time access to a rich range of detailed data when they want it.
Better integrations for improved performance
During the quarter we invested heavily on integrations within our own applications and open connectivity with partners and client systems, bringing significant performance benefits. Our API platform can be easily configured to support data transformations when connecting, for example, fund accounting solutions to either of our investor servicing platforms. And connecting KURE to legacy transfer agency applications provides a consolidated regulatory solution and enhanced user experience.
We also continue to develop partnerships with ID verification services, optical character recognition (OCR) tools and artificial intelligence (AI)/natural language processing (NLP) solutions for data capture to enhance dpWorkflow.
Event-based reporting & automated processing
As part of the ongoing enhancements to our event-based reporting functionality – which enables report generation and distribution to be automated when triggered by a system business event – we have added:
- An option for clients to apply corresponding Classification of Financial Instrument (CFI) records to orders/transactions on triggering of existing ‘Final NAV Created’ and ‘Fill Orders’ in NTAS.
- ‘From last to current NAV’ process option in Report Scheduler, to reduce demand on the application when event-based jobs are set at a higher-entity level (e.g. Fund Group, Portfolio, etc.), to stop all funds in a hierarchy being validated or generated each time a NAV is added.
- The ability to select between business or calendar days for report parameters, to provide clients with increased scheduling flexibility when distributing daily, weekly and monthly investor statements.
- The ability to schedule reports to be automatically triggered on processing of the NTAS Period End via a new standalone event-based reporting event. Integrating the business process with application event-based reporting will allow clients to further automate their internal procedures and increase efficiencies.
Going forward, we plan to further enrich event-based reporting and automated processing in NTAS with new processors and key business events (e.g. dividends) that are regularly performed to provide clients with increased flexibility in the event-based scheduler’s report settings.
STP Payments screen updates
The STP Payments functionality integrates key transactional and payment information in a single screen to automate the payment validation process. During the quarter, we added a new Bulk Date Change feature, and expanded the search and filter options to enhance the user experience and increase automation within the module.
Further planned improvements to increase automation include enhancing the existing batch payments window to enable grouping of the payments to be processed by funding account.
Performance
A performance update to KORDS, our report distribution server, has produced a huge increase in report distribution speeds in our internal testing.
Performance improvements are also planned for the following screens:
- Order entry
- Filling order
- Change request
- Rate of return calculation and reporting
- Trailer fee calculation