Insurance company integrates Blackrock Aladdin with State Street using Rivvit

Client Profile

A life insurance company with nearly 100 active portfolios consisting of $25 Billion in assets and 45,000 unique securities spanning fixed income, equity, derivative, and alternative asset classes.

Business Situation

The client currently follows a hybrid investment management model whereby they outsource a portion of their book to external managers and manage the remainder in-house. All assets are managed on behalf of underlying insurance entities they own. The client is seeking to offer an SMA (Separately Managed Account) strategy to external investors and insurers, however, they are aware that additional process controls and reporting capabilities will be needed to satisfy the demand for transparency from investors.

The client previously relied on one of their affiliated external managers to support their data management and reporting function through a data warehouse owned and operated by the affiliated manager.

Grandview's Role

The client decided to internalize enterprise data management activities that had previously been performed by the affiliated manager. After an initial attempt to develop a custom data warehouse, the client came to the realization that the success criteria were not being met, and they reached out to Grandview Analytics to help them evaluate their situation and identify a path to success with these primary objectives in mind:

Foster a cultural shift to embrace the need for comprehensive information daily versus monthly.
Automate workflows to reduce manual intervention, human error, and processing times.
Increase transparency related to data quality, lineage, and report calculation logic.
Provide tools to monitor and resolve data quality issues.

Phase 1 - Consulting Advisory

Evaluated the current state of the internal data warehouse being developed.
Solicited value statements and success criteria from key stakeholders.
Performed gap analysis on the existing data model and uncovered major missing functionality required to support time series, point-in-time reporting, and auditability.
Provided detailed specifications in an attempt to salvage the internal data warehouse.
Collaborated with internal IT to identify the effort involved in a revamp.
Supported executive sponsors in exploring alternative options.

Upon completion of Phase 1, the client elected to terminate the in-flight project and redirect efforts to implement Grandview’s data management and reporting software, Rivvit.

Phase 2 - Rivvit Implementation

Interviewed stakeholders and analyzed current state reports to identify specific data field requirements.
Created a data dictionary containing data definitions, data cleansing and translation rules, entity resolution identifiers, source hierarchy, quality rules, and data stewards for each data element.
Identified portfolio and security identifier mapping rules across 40+ data sources.
Implemented portfolio grouping capability to support multiple portfolio hierarchies including both legal and at-risk entity groups.
Identified mapping logic to integrate over 40 data sources containing portfolio, security, risk, and accounting information with Rivvit-IDW.
Reverse engineered 20+ “black box” reports to identify detailed specifications.

Results

Deployed production-ready investment data warehouse and reporting capability in 4 months.
Completed 4-month parallel testing period allowing the client to decommission their legacy data warehouse after 8 months.
Converted monthly processes to daily by automating over 300 processes which provided the client with comprehensive information on a T-1 basis.
Implemented a 4-way reconciliation between General Ledger (G/L), Accounting Book of Record (ABOR), Investment Book of Record (IBOR), and Rivvit to ensure systems are in sync.
Converted monthly manual process to daily automated process by interfacing statutory book values, book yields, and book prices from State Street ePAM (ABOR) to Blackrock Aladdin (IBOR) providing portfolio managers with reliable daily accounting metrics to facilitate better investment trading decisions.
Developed accounting roll forward explaining statutory accounting changes between the current and prior period and identifying accounting errors in position and transaction data.
Updated NAIC rating process to support 20 rating levels and corresponding risk-based capital (RBC) charges.
Replicated 20+ reports with drill-down capabilities and documentation support eliminating the black box nature of legacy reports and providing transparency into calculation logic.
Configured Rivvit-DQM to monitor over 75 daily data quality rules capturing missing data elements and outliers based on day-over-day and month-over-month changes versus defined thresholds for accounting and security analytics data to allow more timely investigation and resolution, shortening the length of the monthly close.
Configured Rivvit-Guidelines to monitor state regulatory guidelines daily.