At Four Baring Asset Sites, Shaw On-Site Up, Running

Looking to streamline and consolidate its back-office accounting functionality worldwide, Baring Asset Management (BAM) has gone live with the Shaw On-Site portfolio management and accounting system marketed by Sungard Data Systems Inc.'s Shaw Data Services Inc. subsidiary. A global fund manager operating in the U.S., Europe and the Far East, BAM first went live with the system in Boston in 1993. Following two years of joint development with Shaw, BAM brought the system live in London, Hong Kong and Tokyo on Sept. 1. The system runs on central Unix-based servers in London, linked via local and wide area network to Microsoft Corp. Windows-based clients.

Headquartered in London, BAM is a unit of what was once known as Barings PLC, which now does business under the name ING Barings. ING Barings' two other divisions are Baring Securities and Baring Brothers & Co. It was the Baring Securities unit that underwent the well-known investment catastrophe which culminated ultimately in the buyout of Barings PLC by Dutch ING Bank.

At press time, details of the Shaw On-Site rollout were sketchy. Officials at BAM--including global operations director Wendy Steel and portfolio accounting vice president David Lee--either did not return calls seeking comment or could not be reached. But according to a spokesperson for Shaw who is close to the BAM officials involved in the rollout, Shaw On-Site will initially support only a fraction of BAM's estimated $40 billion in total assets under management. However, says the spokesperson, "although all of BAM's assets are not on the system yet, the plan is that they will be."

According to the spokesperson, Shaw On-Site has been implemented at BAM as a so-called double-entry accounting system. Transactions are only posted to the system's ledger databases--covering assets, liabilities, capital, income and expense--if they balance out in an overnight crosscheck conducted at the central London site. The crosscheck occurs across multiple currencies. Nonposted transactions are shown in an error report, the spokesperson says. Meanwhile, front-office portfolio management takes place in real-time.

In addition to trade processing, BAM uses On-Site to perform valuations, cash movements, reconciliations, settlements, cash management and corporate action processing. The spokesperson says that the Shaw system has been interfaced to BAM's internally developed front-office investment management system.

Says the spokesperson: "The main objective was to have one system that would be able to operate in globally dispersed regions and be able to handle everything simultaneously."

According to the spokesperson, the array of applications BAM previously had online at these locations made producing a consolidated picture of BAM's global portfolio cumbersome. "Previously, they had separate systems in each location that would handle everything separately," says the spokesperson. "There are obvious efficiencies to be gained when you can have one system that does it all."

Prior to tapping Shaw in 1993, BAM had considered several alternatives. "[BAM] liked the fact that this system had been written from scratch in client/server," says the spokesperson. "All of the other systems they were looking for at the time were converted PC systems with network limitations." The spokesperson declines to name Shaw's competition for the BAM account. Shaw On-Site was developed utilizing Unix client/server technology and a Sybase Inc. relational database on Unix platforms.

BAM has deployed Shaw On-Site on Hewlett-Packard Co. HP 3000 servers. Users employ an assortment of IBM-compatible PCs.