Altus

For many pension administrators the process of investing members’ money with fund managers is a weak link in their operations with the potential for very expensive mistakes. Despite its complexity, with multiple stages of checks and approvals spanning administration and finance departments, the process is generally paper based with manual controls. The Altus Instruction Gateway solves this problem through a combination of automated controls, electronic transmission and real time reporting.

The Altus Instruction Gateway automates the whole investment process from the capture of instructions, through validation, approval, release and transmission, to settlement, reconciliation, exception handling and audit trails. Investment instructions can be transmitted electronically via SWIFT using the ViaNova market practice or by fax or e-mail where ViaNova support is not yet available from a fund manager. In either case, the same process is used giving a consistent set of controls and reports.

Administrators and trustees can access the latest price and holding information direct from fund managers and view consolidated reports across funds and schemes and of performance over time.

The Altus Instruction Gateway also provides the opportunity to streamline related processes with optional extensions for banking system integration, defined benefits investment processing and automated reconciliation.

The immediate benefit of adopting an automated approach is a reduction in administrative effort through removal of manual processing steps. More important, however, is the reduction in risk as transcription errors are eliminated, approvals are more strictly controlled and the process more easily audited. Last, and by no means least, is an improved service to clients by providing instant up to date price and holding information and the potential for faster and more frequent transaction cycles.

Altus offers the Instruction Gateway as an installed system or hosted service. Its intuitive browser-based user interface, comprehensive set of web-services, flexible data capture mechanisms and choice of economic SWIFT connectivity methods combine to give a wide range of deployment and integration options.