Case Studies in Data Conversion

Company 1
The investment division of a global, multi-line insurance company with assets under management of $120 billion. For this company, we rendered the following services:

• Conducted an analysis of data sources to validate requirements for the design of a performance measurement system and the installation of our AIMR compliance solution.
• Extracted CUSIP level information for all assets under management for the last ten years.
• Populated multiple time period databases with data from a statutory accounting system.
• Reconciled all inventory positions and historical transactions for ten years.
• Identified procedures that required transformation for total return measurement:
  
  o Late-entered trades
  o Inter and intra company transfers
  o Portfolio mergers
  o Incorrect treatment of Interest Only CMO's
  o Inconsistent usage of transaction codes
  
  
• Supplemented return calculation with new data and processes:
• Built extracts to an ODS that interfaced directly with BlackRock Solutions
• Built extracts for derivatives to an internal data warehouse
• Designed new procedures to calculate committed cash, trade date cash, miscellaneous cash
• Adapted a month-end paid-for-accrued procedure
• Established monthly batch update procedures
• Built comprehensive reconciliation procedures

Company 2
A global investment management company with assets under management of $14 billion.
This company required the following services:

• Assembled ten years of data from multiple global sources to calculate composite returns.
• Identified missing information in current accounting system and extracted required source data from archived databases.
• Conducted data mapping, specification and transformation for ten years of account data and re-calculated all returns.
• Supplemented data with missing characteristic codes.
• Reconciled all results to published reports.
• Populated a central repository with historical account returns and other required data for AIMR compliance.