A leading investment management firm identified a need to modernize the operating model supporting its Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) business.
As the business expanded, portfolio management, trade operations, and compliance teams increasingly relied on spreadsheets, manual calculations, email communications, and disconnected systems to support day-to-day investment operations.
An internal compliance review identified operational gaps that increased risk as the business continued to grow. The firm also recognized that its existing operating model would not efficiently support future growth, reinforcing the need for stronger operational controls, centralized documentation, and greater workflow automation.
The firm’s existing technology environment could not support the complexity of its growing OCIO business. Its legacy order generation platform did not support externally custodied accounts, private asset transactions, non-USD portfolios, or foreign exchange processing, forcing investment teams to manage a significant number of trades outside the firm’s core investment management platform.
Portfolio teams relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual calculations to support workflows that fell outside the capabilities of the existing platform. Trades involving externally custodied accounts, private assets and non-USD portfolios were often calculated and processed manually.
These disconnected processes increased the potential for trade errors, inconsistent controls, and key-person dependency while making it more difficult to support future business growth.
Investment data was received from multiple custodians in different formats. Although a third-party provider normalized much of this data, Grandview identified areas where additional business rules and validation logic were needed before the data could reliably support automated order generation.
The firm’s diverse investment mix also required a security master capable of supporting both traditional and private assets.
Investment management agreements, investment policy statements, and other client documentation were stored across multiple locations and often required manual effort source.
Grandview partnered with business and technology stakeholders to design and implement a centralized operating platform spanning application architecture, data models, and day-to-day investment workflows.
The engagement began with a comprehensive review of business processes, operational workflows, and data requirements across investment management, operations, compliance, risk, and technology teams.
Across approximately 10 workstreams, Grandview documented multiple business workflows and hundreds of data elements. The resulting business and data blueprint became the foundation for the platform’s design, data model, integrations, and implementation, giving business and technology teams a shared roadmap before development began.
Working closely with stakeholders, Grandview helped define an operating platform built around the firm’s OCIO business rather than adapting existing processes to fit an off-the-shelf solution.
The platform centralized and streamlined key investment operations, including:
Grandview also addressed several complex investment data challenges by:
These capabilities brought previously manual trade order proposal and onboarding workflows into the application. Holdings were automatically populated and grouped according to client-defined investment categories, allowing portfolio teams to propose trades without manually consolidating account data. For many orders, the platform then routed trades directly to the appropriate trading desk for execution and confirmation.
Grandview supported the project through development, testing, implementation, client onboarding, and production rollout.
Working alongside business users and developers, the team refined workflows, prepared development stories, validated investment data, supported user testing, and monitored trade processing during go-live to help ensure a successful transition.
Grandview’s institutional investment management experience allowed the team to recommend practical workflow improvements throughout development. These included automatically populating holdings after custody accounts were added and preventing order generation when required legal documents were missing.
The project reduced reliance on manual processes, strengthened operational controls, and established a scalable foundation for continued growth of the firm’s OCIO business.