Kurtosys Cloud platform drives core efficiencies to support strategic transformation agenda
"The success of this project has marked an important milestone in our programme of transformation. Working together effectively has helped us to deliver marketing materials into our distribution ecosystems through a scalable and robust model. It is exciting to see that the results of the efforts of our combined teams is delivering a number of benefits to our clients and customers”
- Zoë Hodge, Head of Global Information Provision
About
abrdn has gone live with a factsheet document automation platform that is helping to deliver efficiencies, reduce cost and reduce risk across global client operations. The Kurtosys Cloud platform is supporting the delivery of a more integrated, cloud-based approach with considerable data-led benefits.
abrdn is dedicated to helping investors around the world reach their desired investment goals and broaden their financial horizons. Kurtosys has supported abrdn for a number of years now – helping them integrate following their merger and supporting their global transformation agenda.
With a number of different factsheet approaches in place, the company needed to integrate document automation to create ‘one’ consistent approach globally. Kurtosys were appointed to help abrdn to improve and consolidate marketing document automation onto a single platform, across all fund ranges and business lines.
A cross-functional team comprising SMEs from abrdn and Kurtosys have worked together to deliver full factsheet document automation across all products – including Quant, Liquidity, OEIC, and SICAV funds. The strength of our relationship and experience of working together has supported effective delivery despite the challenges faced as a result of COVID 19.
Further ranges from North America and Asia Pacific will be implemented throughout 2021. At the heart of the automated solution has been the integration of abrdn’s proprietary data service layer with the Kurtosys Cloud.
‘As a business we continue to innovate, improve efficiency and deliver enhanced solutions for our clients and customers. Kurtosys have played a vital role in helping us improve our document automation and increase the volume and quality of factsheets that we provide globally. Central to this has been their strategic advice, innovative solutions, and the trusted working relationships that they have built with our teams’
The Benefits
abrdn continues to drive for using Cloud based vendors to support its digital future. Kurtosys have helped reduce cost, increase production volumes and increased capability and reach across all abrdn funds. They have also significantly increased the scale and volume of factsheets being produced – moving from Fund to Share Class factsheets with multiple language and country versions now available.
They have helped abrdn comply with new regulations, extending language translation across all abrdn’s markets and have also helped to deliver revised European Securities and Markets Authority compliant factsheets for all fund ranges. This has included all jurisdictional variations and translations and combined data feeds.
‘Centralising a comprehensive set of fund data across abrdn represented a significant undertaking. We have had to overcome a number of complexities to ensure we had in place a data service to meet the highest possible levels of quality and governance. The team excelled in the delivery and were able to integrate with the Kurtosys Cloud in a seamless and future proofed manner. It is a highly successful data project, which stands abrdn and Kurtosys in good stead as the programme continues to roll out’
How product and service helped
abrdn implemented Data as a Service in the Data Acquisition and Provision layer, which was set up to integrate automatically with the Kurtosys platform. Kurtosys configured:
- An extract, transform, load (ETL) layer to ingest the data
- InDesign templates with component-level, conditional logic to minimise the number of templates needed
- Workflow and approval processes
- Management information dashboards to monitor production runs
- An integrated distribution mechanism to external services such as Fundinfo.
Results
abrdn’s Kurtosys platform now generates around 7,500 documents in 11 languages a month, and yields significant time savings for users. The process runs at considerable scale, automating high volumes of documents. It offers re-usable components; straight through data processing; and standardised templates with customised variants to accommodate the presentational nuances of each product range.
The project has used the Agile and Scrum methodologies, with two-week sprint cycles initially. It has enhanced this with a lean, Kanban-style approach during joint user acceptance testing (JUAT). This allowed for faster resolution of issues identified during testing and underwriting, and tight collaboration at time-critical delivery milestones. As a result, abrdn have been able to consolidate its vendor footprint, reduce cost, and reduce risk – delivering substantial returns on the overall investment.
Going forward abrdn will house compliance approved data in the Kurtosys app which will enable the use of this data simultaneously for other downstream applications and distribution purposes in the future.