Case Study
Our clients are large investment banks who publish thousands of benchmark and custom indices on a daily basis. Times are tough in the industry, as the result of a ‘perfect storm’ of benchmark regulations, demand for highly customized indices and increasing competition from pure-play index providers. To secure sustainable growth and deliver high-quality services to their end clients, banks need skilled offshore teams who can support their business throughout the index life cycle.
The Challenge
Index research teams in investment banks must create and maintain a wide range of indices to serve structuring and assetmanagement teams.
Over time, indices have become increasingly complex. At the same time, the demands of complying with market regulations such as IOSCO and EU BR have grown. Some clients have long-term engagement models with offshore vendors – but only to support one aspect of the index life cycle. That leaves onshore staff stretched to the limit, struggling to manage everything else with small teams. Banks need to free up their onshore teams so they can drive growth intead of fighting fires.
Our Solution
Drawing on our deep understanding of the client’s business, we can partner banks’ onshore teams in three key areas:
- Regulatory support.
Our most senior analysts take care of inventory reports, restatement logs, auditor collaborations, checks and balances and general monitoring of controls. - Reporting.
We can produce various index reports (attribution, performance and position), onboard new reports in standard formats and also create highly complex custom reports. This is a crucial area, as the reports are used for risk management, stress testing, performance management and attribution analysis. - Automation.
Our team, skilled in Python, VBA and SQL, can handle projects from process-level automations to supporting onshore index developers with backtests and launches.
To ensure efficiency, we provide shift handover, production and calculation-status reports after the UK and US markets close. We also hold daily status calls, weekly governance calls and monthly calls with Evalueserve management. A robust governance structure allows teams to plan for global projects, new index launches and other ad-hoc tasks. New work streams are handled by specialist teams
Benefits Achieved
Banks who work with us can reduce the time to launch an index by 20%, on average.
At the same time, they can substantially boost their index count – by 10%+ year on year, in some cases.
Time to market also improves, thanks to our skills in developing and launching indices.
Our process automation skills help maintenance teams take on more added-value tasks, with fewer restatements due to human error.
Reporting can become a potent marketing tool for banks’ structuring and trading teams, and turnaround time to on-board new reports is shorter too.
By assigning new workstreams to restructured teams, most clients find that their costs hardly increase at all.
With the new support and team structure in place, they are ideally placed to go for growth – with Evalueserve as their partner
