Case Study: Fund Administration System Reengineering

Client Overview

The client is the world’s leading provider of financial services to institutional investors. With $15.3 trillion in assets under custody and $1.9 trillion under management, the client operates in 26 countries and more than 100 geographic markets worldwide. Its broad and integrated range of services spans the entire investment spectrum, including research, investment management, trading services and investment servicing. In all of the markets that the client serves, it ranks among the top world wide service providers.

Business Drivers

• The fund administration system is a web-based application used to prepare and monitor customers’ performance reporting to Fund’s board of directors, shareholders, and financial media publications.
• The legacy system had been approaching its operational limits and would not support a substantial increase in users of funds.
• The business users requested a more consolidated and scalable system.

Project Challenges

• Large Migration Effort: The legacy system has large volume of source code, including around 2000 ASP pages, 1800 stored procedures, and 400 DB tables.
• Incompatible of the cross platforms porting: The legacy system was developed under Windows/MSSQL with some windows specific technologies in use. It has to figure out the replaceable and workable solution to port under Linux/DB2.
• Lack of Document: Only the source code was handed over with few technical and functional documents. It had to extract the business logic from the bundles of source code.

Solution/Methodology

The Insigma

The Insigma project team took a purely offshore outsourcing model to provide the solution package:

• The technologies covered in the project included: Linux, DB2, Websphere, Java/J2EE, Flex
• Migrated backend database from MS SQL to IBM DB2
• Re-wrote 2000 ASP pages with Flex and constructed the application as J2EE web application
• Took a phased and iterative development approach to ensure product continuity and project quality

Benefits

• Improved user experience with the RIA technology.
• New consolidated system enabled customers to conduct business more efficiently, which was especially beneficial to tax professionals.
• Improved system scalability to support larger data volume.
• Reduced system maintenance cost.
• Became the first enterprise system running latest IBM DB2 on Linux for that customer.

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