Charles River Development (Charles River), a front- and middle-office investment software solutions provider, today announced that KD Funds Management Company LLC (KD Funds), one of the largest asset managers in Central and Eastern Europe, is live on the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS).
The project, delivered on-time and on-budget, is part of KD Funds' initiative to automate the firm's equity, fixed income and foreign exchange investment operations. KD Funds in Slovenia now has automated portfolio management, order management and real-time compliance monitoring on a single, consolidated platform.
"KD Funds is significantly expanding assets under management beyond the Balkan region. This requires a sophisticated system that can automate and centralize all our mutual fund and institutional portfolio information and workflows in one place," said Louise Chatwood, Member of the Board, KD Funds. "We looked at a broad range of options, including some local and regional offerings. We concluded that Charles River delivered the technology and expertise to support our immediate requirements and as a global vendor, could support our future needs in the rapidly developing regional markets."
Automating KD Funds' portfolio management processes was critical to the project. Charles River IMS eliminates KD Funds' reliance on spreadsheets. Users can now monitor actual positions and view all holdings and order-level information in a single workspace. The project also allowed KD Funds to replace its in-house confirmation "order book" with a fully-automated and complete audit trail. Users can monitor compliance in real-time throughout the trade lifecycle, including pre-trade, for any asset class or currency.
According to Luka Flere, Senior Portfolio Manager who headed the project, "The implementation of Charles River IMS has facilitated the order workflow process considerably by automating pre-trade compliance and improving the robustness of the process. The system's portfolio managing capability has been the major benefit for the portfolio managers."
In the next phase, KD Funds will leverage Charles River IMS to manage equity options in the portfolios. The firm also plans to implement the broker-neutral Charles River Network for fully-integrated global electronic trading via FIX (Financial Information eXchange).
"As the first Slovenian firm to automate its operations with Charles River IMS, KD Funds now has a competitive advantage in the region and a scalable platform to support future growth," said Jon Steward, Managing Director-EMEA, Charles River Development. "KD Funds is now driving acceptance of electronic FIX trading in Slovenia, demonstrating its leadership in addressing the challenges of Eastern Europe's rapidly-evolving financial market."
Charles River serves over 300 diverse investment management clients across 38 countries, including 80 firms across 17 European countries.