As I meet and talk to CEOs and CIOs, one of the biggest challenges CEOs and CIOs face is selecting the right software and software vendor to partner with. This is one of the most important decisions facing a company. The wrong software could sink a company; but the right software implemented properly provides a strong competitive advantage and not only reduces cost in the tangibles like reduced labor cost but more importantly increases organizational agility in areas not typically thought of such as retaining organizational knowledge, IP and business skills irrespective of employees coming or going. Can your software do this or are you beholden to some employee(s) whose presence or availability is crucial to your understanding what is going on in your business.
One of our customers, (a subsidiary of one on Nigeria’s leading banks) had to literarily beg and treat its main asset manager like royalty. This asset manager ran a couple of Mutual Funds but nobody had a clue what he was doing; the software he was using was inadequate, it took weeks to arrive at the Mutual Fund valuations and they had to take his word for it. He spent practically every weekend in the office and had this massive excel spreadsheets no one else understood. If this guy sneezed, management caught a cold. Then here came the kicker; their stock brokerage business was moribund like everyone else and they had plans to aggressively grow their asset management business but were scared stiff because it was clear their existing infrastructure couldn’t handle it.
InfoWARE was called in in desperation to implement both the Wealth management and Mutual Fund modules. Bid and offer price determination is now an end of day event at the click of a button; Fund valuation and risk management is instantaneous; Fund composition is clear and available in detail and graphical view; the asset manager now focuses primarily on investment decisions and monitoring while retail operations (for example fund subscriptions) are handled by customer care management. Our integrated financial control and risk management provides all facets of the organization (financial control, senior management etc) the information and business insight they need, sending reports directly to their mailboxes as and when they need it. And BTW, that walk on water fund manager is no longer with this company but it now manages an asset base more than ten times (10x) larger but with ten times (10x) less the effort.
For one other customer (a non-bank subsidiary asset management firm in Victoria Island, Lagos), the MD first got to know that a fund they managed had dropped nearly 30% in value at a quarterly management retreat. Why? Because the Fund manager himself only became fully aware of the extent of the problem when the he spent the previous week frantically doing the valuation for presentation at the retreat. The right software should have been able to tell the fund manager on a daily basis what the fund valuation was. InfoWARE solutions goes even further; with the risk management and risk monitoring deployed, the fund manager and/or the CEO would have been warned directly via alerts before the problem got that bad.
The good news is that InfoWARE’s end to end ERP solution with its integrated internet banking/retail module is allowing companies in Nigeria and other African countries to out maneuver and out run their competition.
The MD of yet another major bank subsidiary that switched to InfoWARE just a few months ago called their previous software (that used an Oracle backend) “Crap” compared to InfoWARE’s solution and wondered how anyone could even compare the two solutions. InfoWARE enabled them to
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Eliminate the need for internal IT employees
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Quadruple financial control capability while reducing the manpower required by over 50%
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Institute efficient workflow processes that keeps all employees focused on delivering value to customers rather than on operations
To find out more: InfoWARE is holding a users event for customers to provide our product roadmap, to sign up send an email or call us at +234-702-710-7895. It’s free and lunch will be provided but space is limited so call early to reserve a spot. Roadmap topics include
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New equities analytics for market makers and asset managers
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Our FIX implementation even ahead of what the NSE is doing
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Introduction of HR module with integrated Biometrics
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Introduction of Inventory and manufacturing modules
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Extensive improvements to our asset/wealth management modules to handle all asset classes with flexible fee accruals
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New mobile platform initiatives including Windows 8
