Background
One of the Top Three Players
Union Investment (UI) is a top tier German fund manager with entrepreneurial experience spanning over 45 years. With German co-operative banks and highly respected international private financial institutions as principal shareholders, UI has secured a position as one of the top three players in the German investment market. Assets under management have been growing rapidly and totalled over EUR 110bn as at June 2003, giving UI a 17.4 percent share of the German fund market. In terms of fund volume, UI likewise ranks as a prime player among European asset managers.
Through a distribution network comprising co-operative and private banks in Germany, UI has clients in over 17,000 branches. A specialist in providing investment fund products geared to the requirements of retail banking, UI also caters for the needs of institutional investors. In order to meet the increasing demand of a highly diversified product line, UI has built up a comprehensive range totalling over 700 mutual, private label and specialised funds covering every market and investor mentality. At present, UI manages over 7.2 million investment accounts for about four million private and institutional investors at international locations.
Host Consolidation - The IT Challenge
Union Investment is headquartered in Frankfurt with offices in other major European countries - all with their own IT infrastructure and applications to serve the local client base. Investment portfolios are managed locally through call centre operators accessing bespoke applications running on local systems such as an IBM S/390 mainframes (Frankfurt) and DEC OpenVMS systems (Luxembourg).
When faced with the challenge of reducing IT costs, UI decided to centralise the portfolio records and client data on the IBM mainframe in Frankfurt. However, due to data protection legislation from the financial services authority in Luxembourg, client records could not be transferred across country borders. Therefore, a method of making the data anonymous had to be found, where the investment portfolio records were available on the mainframe and client records were maintained in Luxembourg. This meant finding an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution that would enable call centre operators to access the portfolio database and the client database simultaneously. UI wished to avoid retraining their staff and therefore specified that users were to access the systems through the existing ‘DEPOT’ application screens, irrespective of any additional IT elements which might be deployed in support of other objectives.
Meeting Tactical and Strategic Needs
Modcomp’s initial involvement in this project was to undertake a “proof of concept” using ViewMax as the integration technology. This successful demonstration proved to UI that Modcomp had the technical capability and the products to fully meet the challenge of integrating, synchronising and presenting a single view of client details running on a Oracle/Sun platform located in Luxembourg and their funds portfolio running on an IBM S/390 platform in Frankfurt.
Status after Consolidation
Technical Considerations
Modcomp’s software specialists overcame a number of hurdles, to provide Union Investment with a top-quality solution to their exacting requirements. The principle of splitting financial and personal data - outlined above - had to be absolutely respected. Secure communications between Frankfurt and Luxembourg were already established. However, there were still many issues to address:
- How to ensure that UI staff saw information screens where user details and financial data had been brought back together with 100% accuracy every time, without exception.
- How to handle display of data and also the creation and modification of user accounts and personal details.
- How to present data to user desktops which had previously accessed mainframe data.
- How to preserve all of the investment in staff training within UI on the DEPOT application.
- How to provide a complete solution with latency minimised so as to be acceptable to busy retail banking staff.
- How to read, modify and write client personal data quickly and accurately to the Oracle database.
- How to meet pressing timescales for the implementation of the complete customer data protection mechanism.
Modcomp set about meeting these requirements by customising ViewMax. This allowed users to retain application screens with which they were already familiar. Modcomp had already produced customised versions of ViewMax and was able to carry out the engineering needed, using in-house resources.
High-throughput connectivity to the local Oracle database is a standard ViewMax feature. Although ViewMax can readily connect to a wide selection of leading databases, Union Investment have mandated Oracle for superior performance and availability. Not only was Modcomp very happy to comply but also to warrant the throughput of their Oracle interface.
Modcomp specialists worked in partnership with EDS, an existing IT supplier to Union Investment, to develop an “anonymous key” technique, which would provide absolute dependability in relating the correct personal data to every account record.
A sequence of scripts was devised to control the operation of the ViewMax engine, which would use the key to access personal data, for reinsertion into the "anonymised" account data screens. Reconstituted screens were then sent to the user’s terminal, accurately recreating the screens which previous DEPOT applications would have generated.
The speedy and accurate reconstruction of displays in this way is a significant achievement, but not sufficient to allow operators to perform all their tasks. Modcomp also had to be able to support the modification or creation of user records, in real time – a considerably greater challenge. A combination of careful analysis and the deployment of much of the flexibility engineered into the ViewMax package led to a successful implementation.
As a result, Union Investment personnel can now create, modify, search and display user records just as they always have in the past. The new screens mimic the familiar DEPOT application. Thanks to the choice of ViewMax - plus an appropriate hardware platform and supporting database - users experience almost no delay as ViewMax "anonymises" or reconstitutes screens “on the fly”.
Behind the scenes, sensitive account-holder details are now retained entirely in the locality where their account is created, while purely financial data is handled in strict anonymity on the central mainframe. This allows for client confidentiality but still retains the efficiency and security of large scale processing of funds.
The flexibility of ViewMax allowed Modcomp personnel to meet UI’s timescale and to provide a comprehensive and robust solution to the bank’s exacting requirement. Thanks to the flexibility of the software architecture, additional requirements – such as a database integrity checking facility – could readily be addressed as they were identified.
Conclusion
With today’s technology, organisations can no longer justify regional or country specific IT applications. Low cost, high bandwidth data communications with VPN security has enabled leading organisations to consolidate these applications into a central data centre. Where legal, operational or local regulations prohibit a total consolidation - as in the case of Union Investment - Modcomp’s integration technology and expertise can make the difference between success and failure.
“No one else could provide a solution that met all our requirements,” said Markus Weller, Union Investment project leader. “ Modcomp’s co-operation was excellent, especially during critical phases of development. Problems were met head-on with constructive solutions, quickly implemented by Modcomp’s skilled software integration specialists.”
Thanks to the inherent strengths of ViewMax and the flexibility and professionalism of Modcomp specialists, working from both UK and German offices, Modcomp were able to meet and exceed Union Investment’s requirements. Modcomp’s solution is transparent to UI’s staff and has proven reliable and flexible in service.