Overview
The client, a leading, privately held investment management firm, serves clients from Hong Kong and London, and the United States. The firm had implemented Eagle PACE and Performance in 2005. Although it had performed two upgrades over 15 years, it was still running on a version that was at end of its life. The Eagle software, operating system, and Oracle version were all at end of life with support ending at year-end. Our client engaged Cutter to review its Eagle PACE and Performance implementation, including the custom ecosystem built around it.
Cutter Solution
Cutter performed an assessment of the implementation and surrounding ecosystem by conducting in-depth interviews with 31 key employees from IT, investment performance, attribution, data management, investment reporting, and client reporting to understand and document its processes, data flows, gaps, and pain points.
Then, using Cutter research product assessments and peer analysis combined with expertise of Cutter’s implementation practice, we evaluated the fit of the Eagle product for the firm, identifying several areas of opportunity.
As is common with many longstanding implementations, the firm had performed upgrades to the software, but had not taken advantage of new capabilities that had been built into the product. A highly customized ecosystem had been built around the product, much of which was now out-of-the-box capabilities for the product.
Cutter found that our client was underutilizing the performance and attribution capabilities of Eagle performance, leading to complex integrations, manual processes, and reconciliations among multiple systems.
The challenges were not all related to under-utilization; in some cases Eagle was being used for processes where it was not the best fit and Cutter recommended those processes be moved off of Eagle.
Based upon Cutter’s detailed findings, our client was able to get a clear picture of the state of its current Eagle implementation along with actionable recommendations for transitioning to an implementation offering greater value and supportability.
Cutter assisted the firm in restoring a fractured Eagle relationship which was crucial to make the changes necessary to take advantage of all the value the product had to offer.
The client acted on the recommendations to redesign processes that were not a fit for Eagle and has begun a project to re-implement Eagle Data Management and Performance on Eagle Access. Primary objectives of the implementation are to leverage out-of-the-box capabilities, eliminate customizations, and simplify the ecosystem by retiring other systems that provide functionality available on Eagle Performance.
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