BIMCOR Centralizes on Data Management Solution

MONTRÉAL-Canadian pension fund manager BIMCOR has experienced improved data management and data analysis capabilities after streamlining processes with a data management and performance solution from Eagle Investment Systems.

Having selected Eagle in 2004, the project was aimed at centralizing data and moving to a daily performance model. "We wanted to have a central data repository where data comes in once, gets validated and qualified and then could be fed into other data systems. We were also looking to move to a daily pricing model," says Brian Kouri, vice president, finance and administration at Montréal-based BIMCOR, manager of the Bell Canada Enterprises' pension fund, with approximately $13 billion under management.

Even though BIMCOR already had a securities data pricing system, the previous model had limited capabilities and was partly third-party and partly the firm's own design.

The decision to go with Eagle was made due to the chief investment officer's previous positive experience with the solutions and the IT staff's focus on the system. "Our IT team had been looking at introducing a package and they had zeroed in on Eagle as one that was very much worth exploring. Our chief investment officer also came from a firm that was a heavy Eagle user," explains Kouri.

In 2005, BIMCOR started implementing Eagle PACE, consolidating its investment data into a single hub. Kouri explains that throughout 2005 the firm introduced Eagle's performance measurement solution, which permits the firm to do the daily performance calculations as well as "a whole series of analyses around the performance data and the valuation data." By also implementing the Eagle portal, users have access to that information on their desktop.

Mal Cullen, head of Eagle's Canadian operations, says Eagle's Performance solution allows clients to leverage the Eagle data hub and deliver validated data to be used in daily performance measurement, attribution and reporting.

BIMCOR started 2006 on a pure daily performance basis. "In the first several months of the year we ran in a parallel mode, running our old performance system and the Eagle performance system until we felt confident that we had everything fine-tuned," says Kouri.

In total, around 40 people from the investment accounting team and the investment team are using the solution. "It's a big help to the investment team and it is primarily geared that way, but it does also serve to provide data to the back office team," he remarks. Some of the data from the Eagle system feeds back into BIMCOR's investment accounting system, for instance, and the analysis tools enable staff to track and measure data in different ways.

Having implemented Eagle's data management and performance measurement solutions, BIMCOR will now focus on how to further utilize the system. The firm intends to take advantage of a function that allows users to provide the ability to load multiple sources of the same type of data and create golden copies for prices and securities reference data, for example.

"The notion of best pricing is something we want to consider because we have different pricing sources available to us. As part of our whole mission to make sure that the data stored within the data hub is accurate and complete, if supplier A's data points seem a little bit off, we would want to be able to look at the data that comes from supplier B," says Kouri, remarking that BIMCOR has already sent IT staff on a best pricing course. The firm intends to start using the best pricing solution downstream later this year.

Cullen says the model BIMCOR chose, adding on functions after going live with the data management solution, is also the general trend in the industry. "BIMCOR is now our seventh Canadian client that has first implemented a data management solution and then gone on to our performance measurement tool," he notes.

Tine Thoresen