New front office for RMB Asset Management

JOHANNESBURG and LONDON – RMB Asset Management has implemented LatentZero’s Capstone platform, which will form the backbone of the fund manager’s new front-office environment. Capstone comprises three products: Minerva, an order management system and trading application; Tesseract, a modelling and decision support tool; and Sentinel, the vendor’s flagship compliance product. The six-month long implementation was led by Peresys, a Johannesburg-based technology consultancy and LatentZero’s South African partner.

Stephen Jones, head of IT at RMB Asset Management, which manages approximately ZAR200bn (@15bn), explains that RMB had been using a front-office platform from Microgen, a Hampshire-based specialist financial services vendor, but due to a new outsourcing deal with JPMorgan and the need to streamline its asset management operations, decided to sign with LatentZero. "We were late in actually signing the contract because the implementation was governed by a heads of terms agreement – a contract of understanding that we were taking the product and the basic financial terms had been agreed – and we left the contract until we were well into the implementation," Jones says.

"The implementation took six months, although the selection process was accelerated because we were under pressure to meet certain business targets; our front-office solution [at the time] was integrated into our back-office platform and we needed to segregate the functionality into multiple back offices because of the outsourcing deal with JPMorgan. The other reason for the implementation was to improve our trade execution capabilities and generally to move to a slicker straight-through model," Jones says.

London-based Threadneedle Investments announced in June that it was in negotiations with JPMorgan with the intention of appointing the investment bank as its provider of outsourced investment operations services.