Our work with various Asset Management organizations stretches back to the early 1990s and we continue to provide services to this market. Examples of some of our projects are shown below.

As the investment management section of one of the UK's largest insurance companies, our client has almost £30bn under management in several large funds. Performance measurement and reporting is an important and time-consuming task for the department.

Maddox Ford designed and implemented a system that measures the performance of funds and produces reports that compare the funds to published benchmarks and indices. The large number of reports is then produced automatically each month for distribution to clients and managers.

The basic requirement of the system was to take raw, low level holdings information and produce reports that matched the structure of benchmarks and indices from disparate sources. This required some complex data modelling so that the large volumes of data could be accessed and restructured in a short time frame.

Our client is the asset management arm of an international banking group with some £35bn under management from some very prestigious clients. We have developed a number of systems for the client covering all areas of investment management. Core to many of the bank's processes and software was the security classification system which we designed and implemented.

With the diverse array of financial instruments available to investors, the classification, allocation and reporting of securities held in funds is not an easy task. This application classifies all holdings in the 2000 or more funds that the bank manages, every night, into the elements that uniquely identify each instrument. Complex summations are then performed to show each fund in a breakdown that the fund manager requires.

The front end allows each fund manager to specify the hierarchical breakdown of each fund by dragging, dropping and expanding the detail lines that are required. The system also allows some flexibility in the reporting, for instance for bond markets the instruments may be better allocated to countries by their currency of issue rather than country of origin so that exposure to currency fluctuations can be more easily spotted.

Our client was using a simple Visual Basic system to route the path of a foreign exchange deal to ensure that the rates were correct and that the restrictions the client imposed were met. As legislation changed to increase the disclosure required for foreign exchange, and the requirements for the system grew, the client decided that the system had to be replaced. Maddox Ford was commissioned to develop a replacement system, which closely followed the workflow of a foreign exchange deal.

The new system allowed the users to take a block of deals directly from the equity desk, and then 'shape' them into the most efficient number of foreign exchange deals (taking into account any restrictions the client may have placed on obtaining the currency). The foreign exchange deal could then be pushed through the necessary steps of the workflow.

This client is an asset management company that manages portfolios in the Lloyds insurance and syndicates market together with a small number of private clients. Their requirement was for a client/server-based portfolio management system (to replace a functionally outdated legacy system) to keep track of all trades, stocks & portfolios and to produce various standard and IMRO-required reports.

The application performs a number of portfolio management tasks such as buying and selling the array of different instruments that this client deals in. It also includes a price-to-yield and yield-to-price calculator for 'what-if' analysis when considering swaps. A suite of performance reports detail the trades executed in a portfolio and analyse their performance in terms of income, capital gain and accrued interest.