Insight Investment has announced that it has upgraded to Cogent Consulting's next generation of the industry leading ResearchTrak for conducting its "broker view" to determine how to allocate commissions to Insight's more than 140 sell-side brokerage firms and research providers.
Insight has £112 billion in assets under management as at 30 June 2008. Like many large, global investment managers, Insight has a complex vote, involving 75 people in research and fund management, across the equity and fixed income teams that need to assign thousands of points to value systematically its brokerage and research providers.
"The first generation of ResearchTrak helped us move in 2002 from time consuming spreadsheets to a more efficient, semi-automated, online broker vote technology," said Sandy Black, Insight's head of equities. "We have been entirely satisfied, so there was no need to conduct a search when Cogent asked us to upgrade to its next generation."
"The new version of ResearchTrak significantly enhances the voting process," Mr. Black explained. "It enables us to reduce the time required for all aspects of the vote. A new, more colourful look and feel makes screen voting easier and improves the usability of final reports. More powerful technology generates results online immediately after everybody votes, and we can quickly add new features and reports as needed."
Robin Hodgkins, President of Cogent, said the latest release of ResearchTrak, which was written in ASP.Net, includes several other improvements to make the broker experience in supporting their clients' data requests even easier.
"Broker contacts can now automatically update coverage information, reducing the need for contact maintenance," he said. "In addition, client attendees can be mapped with a new utility to ensure that typos in a broker's client contact lists don't result in interactions not being linked to the proper person, thus reducing vote impact."