Context
A growing asset manager handled its operations — reconciliations, valuations, client reporting — manually, between Excel files and email exchanges. Growing assets under management made every month-end riskier, and portfolio managers lacked consolidated visibility to decide.
The challenge
Automate without a big bang: the back-office team had to keep producing during the transformation, and every automation had to be controllable and auditable (regulated business, demanding institutional clients).
Our approach
- 01
Field observation of a full month-end cycle to quantify every task: 60% of the time went into just three processes.
- 02
Automation of reconciliations (custodian, accounts, transactions) with tolerance rules and a human-handled exception queue.
- 03
Client-reporting chain generated automatically and validated four-eyes before release.
- 04
Near-real-time decision dashboards for management: AuM, performance, exposures, liquidity.
Results
Around 40% of manual tasks disappeared and month-end production is three times faster, with no additional hires despite AuM growth. The back-office team refocused on value-added exception analysis.
