Asset servicing solutions provider Northern Trust and data-driven platform Confluence, have announced a new partnership aimed at providing financial and regulatory reporting solutions for Northern Trust’s European asset manager clients.
Parties responsible for investment funds such as asset managers, investors, directors and regulators are required to produce a wide range of financial statements and regulatory reports as part of their disclosure obligations.
Through this new partnership, the organisations will attempt to utilise data technology to streamline the preparation process for financial documentation and the delivery of fund disclosures. The intention is to reduce time spent on manual tasks to help clients meet reporting obligations in a timely and accurate manner.
To achieve this, Northern Trust will rely on Confluence’s automation capabilities.
Firstly, it will use Confluence’s Unity Financial Reporting to automate the creation of statements and holdings reports. The solution significantly automates the process involved to build related documents, reducing the time it takes to prepare first drafts. Meanwhile, standardised templates will be used to ensure consistency of reporting style.
Furthermore, Northern Trust is drawing on Confluence’s Unity NXT Regulatory Reporting platform to additionally automate the sourcing and aggregation of data for clients’ regulatory reporting. Interfacing with Confluence’s platform, client data held by Northern Trust will be matched with international templates and rules to meet the specifications of international regulators.
Todd Moyer, president and COO at Confluence, was pleased with the new arrangement, believing it would improve the efficiency of Northern Trust’s processes and highlight the value of his company’s work.
He said “Producing these reports can often be inefficient and time-consuming – involving highly-manual calculations and publishing processes. At the same time, the growing scope of international regulation and heightened scrutiny on the investment industry in recent years has made these tasks more complex and resource intensive. We are excited at Confluence about the partnership and work that we have been doing with Northern Trust to help support more streamlined financial documentation for funds. This is the start of a strong partnership and we look forward to working with Northern Trust to deliver first-class products and services.”
Clive Bellows, head of Global Fund Services, Europe, Middle East and Africa at Northern Trust added: “Northern Trust is committed to creating greater efficiencies for clients in how their reporting is prepared and delivered, to the specifications required by regulators. Partnering with Confluence helps us deliver on that objective – automating inefficient reporting practices, improving accuracy and creating high-quality documentation to support our clients’ diverse fund offerings and investment strategies.”
Northern Trust Corporation was founded in Chicago in 1889. It offices in 20 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. alongside 23 locations in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. It had assets under custody and administration of $10.9 trillion, and assets under management of US$1.2 trillion.
