Insignia is a leading provider of quality financial services, with more than $149.5 billion in funds under management, administration and advice. Insignia service more than 500,000 customers across Australia.
Insignia’s advice firms were looking for a way to maximise client investment outcomes through the use of Managed Discretionary Accounts (MDA). As an Open Architecture firm, Insignia used a number of third party MDA’s and were were looking to start streamlining their portfolio rebalancing and model portfolio administration processes.
Insignia were looking to uplift their internal managed account solution across both Equities and Managed Fund investment options. The solution had to allow their teams to manage discretionary portfolios in a more efficient, compliant and scalable way, and the initial solution had to lay the foundations for future managed account innovation.
Technically it was important for the end solution to be tightly integrated with their internal platform, including seamless integration with their existing platform micro-services.
Ultimately, Insignia wanted to provide their advisers with investment solutions to help them attract, retain and better service their clients.
Insignia undertook extensive business and technology due diligence on PortfolioCloud, including code reviews, architecture reviews, security audits and business fundamentals.
Once due diligence, legals and commercials were successfully complete, a joint project implementation team was established to bring together the key delivery resources from both Insignia and PortfolioCloud. Project governance was quickly established, with regular meeting cadence to track progress, manage escalations and control delivery.
The implementation centred on four key work streams:
Work streams were led by the relevant business owners who took responsibility for product delivery, change management processes and all cross-team dependencies.
There were a number of Innovations and product enhancements captured throughout the project delivery. These included:
As an important strategic project for Insignia, it was critical that quality was built into the process. The testing framework was established very early on, and this allowed the testing suite to grow along with the project build.
A joint project of this nature can be challenging, especially when teams are working together for the first time. To reduce potential team divisions and conflicts, effort was spent up front harmonising the teams to ensure they would work effectively together for the duration of the project.
Operations teams were also brought into the project from inception to ensure that the end result met all the operational requirements. Similarly, the product teams were injected into the project squads to help drive buy-in from target end users.
Training sessions were run by PortfolioCloud experts to transfer the necessary knowledge required to operate the software and make best use of the new tools.
The project was delivered on time, on budget and with a high degree of quality. As a result Insignia launched their Managed Discretionary Account (MDA) on time to a limited number of firms in March 2020. This same MDA service was then rolled out to all advice firms under the Insignia banner in July 2020.
In partnership with PortfolioCloud, Insignia have built a flexible managed account framework that is tightly integrated into their platform and allows them to offer a wide range of investment solutions for aligned and non-aligned brands. Insignia have been able to build a market leading solution, and have supplemented their investment operations team and technical capabilities with the help of PortfolioCloud.
There are a number of exciting future managed account projects within Insignia, and we look forward to this being a long and fruitful long term partnership.
