To meet the increasing demands of rapid growth, regulatory compliance, and business diversification, The Olayan Group (Olayan) has selected TAP to provide its core reference data management system, underpinning a major systems upgrade for its global asset management business.
The TAPMaster data management platform will become Olayan's corporate data hub, deploying and managing data on securities, issuers, counterparties, transactions, and holdings to support new systems for portfolio accounting, order management, and general ledger.
"We are a highly specialized and complex business, but we don't have limitless IT resources," said Ali Al-Ashqar, Olayan's CTO. "We were looking for an off-the-shelf product that would both ease the implementation with of new business applications and be flexible enough to integrate future asset class coverage, compliance requirements, and data sources. This system forms the data foundation of our new enterprise-wide system architecture, so selecting a modern, scalable solution that can be easily managed and maintained was crucial for us. TAPMaster offers the best solution for our needs."
TAP will work with Olayan's staff in New York, London, and Athens.
Installation will take place in April, and full integration of the new systems will be completed later this year. TAP will also convert crucial historical information held on a number of legacy systems. TAP believes the short timeline for the program rollout provides an excellent example of TAPMaster's flexibility and capability, and complements Olayan's forward-thinking approach.
"TAPMaster's competitive advantages lie in our fully automated approach to feed management and cross-referencing, as well as very accessible, open architecture for integration to whatever business applications the client chooses," said Simon Blyth, TAP's EVP Sales and Alliances. "Olayan has taken a very progressive view in thinking about the business challenges facing investment managers today and looked for a way to turn the problem into an opportunity. TAPMaster is an enabling technology that supports that approach."