Bank Sarasin & Co. Ltd, a leading Swiss bank in investment advisory and asset management for private and institutional clients, has been using GAIN DataDesktop since 2002 for the ad-hoc opening of instruments as well as the export of SIX Telekurs data to other systems and the production of data change reports. Due to larger market volumes and a strong internationalisation, it became necessary for Bank Sarasin to take in a central data management platform to facilitate the delivery of SIX Telekurs data to Sarasin subsidiaries and reduce the effort for data maintenance.

"Owing to the positive experience with GAIN Data Management in the past and the strong and proven track re-cord in the Avaloq community, we have chosen to upgrade the existing solution to AIM Software's central security master file. Moreover, GAIN's interface is the only one certified by Avaloq, and GAIN is a scalable platform that can grow along with our future needs," says Julius Zürcher, Head of Operations at Bank Sarasin. "We will be able to further automate the opening of instruments directly in Avaloq and take another step towards full straight through processing."

Whenever a bank adds a new instrument to its portfolio, it must first be opened in the core banking application. The request for the opening may either come from the trading room, the internet banking platform or any other department that needs the information. The automatic opening feature of GAIN delivers all necessary fields without manual interference. This ensures significant time and cost savings for Bank Sarasin and eliminates the risk of flawed inputs.

In the first phase of the project, AIM Software installed the certified Avaloq adapter for Avaloq 2.6 which went live mid-November. Further planned steps include the automation of corporate actions, the improvement of the price delivery as well as the deployment of the full range security master file at Bank Sarasin. By using GAIN as central data management platform, Bank Sarasin will be able to centrally manage the data quality and the delivery of data feed information to its international subsidiaries thus considerably cutting infrastructure costs.

Over the last few years, the evolution of the GAIN platform at Bank Sarasin has been fully aligned with developments of the Avaloq banking system. Martin Buchberger, Head of Marketing and Sales at AIM Software, explains: "The joint development efforts of Avaloq and AIM Software have resulted in a fully tested and certified Avaloq adapter, for us an important milestone in the reduction of costs that arise from duplicate proprietary developments of banks. The GAIN|Avaloq adapter is already being used by a large client base, and customers like Bank Sarasin help us to reduce the effort for a single institution."