Case Study

Confessions of a fund manager

Fund managers at Reliance Capital Asset Management were used to twisting and turning their queries. The IT systems had to handle that. By Aditya Kelekar

Vinay Nigudkar, Head of IT RCAM

In some ways, today's fund managers are like the astrologers forecasting the start of rains in yesteryears-if they are right, they are revered as demi-gods, but should they miscalculate the market sentiments, they are bathed in ignominy. Except that fund managers make their calculations based on the scientific dissection of the market trends and a huge database. And managers now have sophisticated tools that accurately predict market dynamics. Well, not always accurately.

The team which asked for more

The fund managers at Reliance Capital Asset Management (RCAM) seemed to be not getting enough of their analytic tools. "Most of our systems would generate static reports. You can't play around with these reports," said Vinay Nigudkar, Head of IT at the company, which manages Reliance Mutual Fund (RMF) schemes.

RMF is a part of the Reliance - Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, and has average assets under management of Rs 90,813 crore for the month of June 2008, and an investor base of over 6.7 million. RCAM is a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Capital.

RCAM has a transaction management system powered by Credence Analytics. It has also deployed a CRM solution from CRM Next and a BPM solution from Savion. Though the CRM solution and the transaction and portfolio management solutions had reporting capabilities, they would often fall short when it came to providing detailed reporting. Nigudkar chose MAIA's 1Key as the front-end tool for processing the reports. The fact that the deployment was to take only a couple of days also went in the application's favor.

Nigudkar says that fund managers need to modify their queries at various stage of their decision-making process. "With MAIA 1Key, it is very easy for us to prepare our query.

The IT group might have earlier taken 15 minutes to process a query, but that's not what the end-user may require; the end-user wants it now." The application has an Excel-like interface, which, Nigudkar says, has helped users to readily adapt to it. RCAM has an enterprise-level license for the 1Key product.

The CRM Next deployment at RCAM helps in sales force automation, lead management, and customer service, from identifying a customer to attending customer's needs.

Datawarehouse plans

RCAM's group company, Reliance Capital, has purchased an enterprise intelligence platform from SAS, the rollout of which is to start soon. "SAS deployment will help in cleansing and mining of data," said Nigudkar.

Though the analytics modules of the deployment will help top management, Nigudkar is doubtful whether the average business user will profit significantly. "The refined insights provided by SAS may not be necessary or even desirable at all level of employees," he said. Data warehouse is a prerequisite for the SAS implementation, and Reliance Capital is planning to set it up as a common infrastructure for the entire company.

aditya.kelekar@expressindia.com