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Fast-forward eight months and CUNA Mutual Group is now live on
thinkFolio and EDM following a close collaboration with our
professional services team. We took the opportunity to speak to
their Investment Operations & Technology Director, Mark Weber,
about the implementation, managing a go-live during a pandemic and
how the solutions are supporting the business.
Q: Thinking back to the start of the project, what were
the main business drivers?
Scalability was the number one driver. We have very ambitious
growth plans and we realized that in order to support the growth of
our investment portfolio, we needed to modernize our underlying
technology and operational processes.
As part of the technology modernization, we wanted to move to an
exception-based environment and pre-trade compliance driven
platform. Through thinkFolio, we wanted to give our portfolio
managers, traders and operations team a more proactive solution
that would automate our processes, requiring manual intervention
only when absolutely necessary. This enables them to focus their
attention on work where they can add more value.
Another driver for the project was the desire to provide our
business customers with more meaningful data insights through
developing our business intelligence and analytics capabilities. We
plan to go live on EDM Warehouse in early 2021 to deliver
self-service BI and reporting capabilities that will transform our
current manual process and further support our growth plans.
Q: CUNA Mutual Group is undergoing a significant
technology transformation. How did the implementation of thinkFolio
and EDM go?
Like any large and complex implementation, there have been
little issues to work through, but generally it's been very
efficient - even amid a global pandemic!
The feedback from our portfolio managers and traders has been
very positive. The system is simple to use and provides support for
broad traditional asset classes as well as newer and increasingly
complex asset classes. Most importantly, it has been a seamless
transition; our portfolio managers and traders have been able to
conduct trades from day one which is so important when building
confidence in new systems. It's quite remarkable really that the
roll-out has been so smooth given the complexity of the
implementation which stretches across many different portfolios and
asset classes.
On the operational side, we see opportunities to promote further
adoption of the platform and make better use of it to drive
efficiencies in our back-office as well.
Q: You chose to run all of our solutions on our Managed
Service which is supported by our cloud partner, Amazon Web
Services. Why did CUNA Mutual Group choose this route?
At a corporate level, our IT strategy is focused on moving to
the cloud as it brings so many benefits. IHS Markit is a leader in
this space and we recognized that your team could help share the
burden of supporting our new IT infrastructure, allowing us to
focus on what really matters to our business - the growth of our
portfolio.
It also turned out to be a good decision given the current
Covid-19 environment. We've been able to deliver a go-live
remotely, in large part thanks to the cloud.
Q: Now that you're live, what are the main benefits you
hope to derive from the implementation?
From my perspective, there are four key benefits to our
business:
Eliminating manual processes and therefore becoming more
efficient and reducing risk;
Moving to an exception-based workflow which will free up our
team's time;
Enabling our back-office and IT operations to support our
business as we aggressively increase our portfolio; and
Providing better informed data-driven insights to the business
through analytics and BI.
In order to make the most of the new solutions, I will be
focused on driving adoption throughout the business and ensuring we
maximize use of the rich features and functionality so we are
realizing as many efficiencies as possible.
Q: Do you have any advice for firms undergoing a similar
IT transformation?
My number one piece of advice would be to engage your end
customers early on in the process. For me, that meant our portfolio
managers and traders. My team worked hard to ensure that they were
comfortable with the new platform and we involved them in
acceptance testing and validation before go-live. The fact that IHS
Markit was able to run our existing environment in parallel with
the new thinkFolio environment enabled our portfolio managers and
traders to feel confident about the move and engaged in the project
as a whole. This was really critical to the success of the
implementation.
More broadly, I would say that firms should really understand
the operational efficiencies a new platform like this can provide.
From my perspective, the implementation should deliver significant
ROI in the back-office too which I'm really excited about.
For us to take on this type of project ourselves would have been
a daunting prospect. It would likely have taken longer, cost more
and may never have seen the light of day. We wanted a partner we
knew we could trust to bring our vision to life and we're confident
we've found that in IHS Markit.
IHS Markit provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.
