MMC leverage robotic processing automation

“The monthly switching process often coincided with the busy end of the week. Now that we have a digital worker on the team, the pressure has been reduced, we can focus on more value-adding tasks and people can go home feeling accomplished.”

Alex Balle, Transfers and Trading Manager, Wealth Operations, MMC

MMC reduce time to process monthly rebalance of trades by 83% with intelligent automation

Introduction

MMC are continuously looking for ways to realize further operational efficiencies and provide the best possible experience for their clients and end-investors. MMC own, develop and maintain their software, which has been designed for the New Zealand investment market. We also work with selected specialist partners to make sure our clients benefit from the expertise of the wider financial services ecosystem.

This story takes a closer look at what we achieved working in close collaboration with Blue Prism, a world leading provider of intelligent automation and robotic processing and Q4, a consultancy firm specializing in adopting a digital workforce strategy.  

Challenge

Automatic portfolio rebalancing is a component of MMC’s comprehensive wealth administration services and was identified as an area that would benefit from further automation by engaging Blue Prism digital workers.

MMC offered a new service to one of their key clients, which allowed them to “switch” funds from one account to another instead of buying and selling and being out of the market when rebalancing portfolios back to agreed asset allocations.  However, this new process saw the transaction volumes increase dramatically for the trading team.

The new service produced between 160 and 600 trades, which all needed to be manually processed at the beginning of each month, whereby the repetitive settling of the switch trades could take up to six hours. To work through this in a timely manner and enable Service Level Agreements to be met, MMC’s employees were at critical times working late nights. Complicating matters was the error-prone nature of manual processing, which could negatively impact the overall client experience.

Solution

To manage the settling of these trades more effectively and to reduce operational risk from incorrect information being entered into the system for these fund switches, MMC deployed intelligent automation. It is a task that Blue Prism digital workers now complete in under five minutes. In addition to the significant improvement on time, employee satisfaction has increased since capacity has been freed up to focus on more value-adding tasks with less time pressure.

What is more, the digital workers have completely removed any manual keying errors. And at peak trading times, when trade numbers can top 600, the Blue Prism digital workforce can easily and instantly scale its capacity. All of which has helped MMC deliver even better services for their clients and improved their employees’ experience.

Results and business impact

• Monthly: a 6-hour to 5 min reduction of the settlement time for client rebalance transactions
• Daily: a time reduction from 20 minutes to 3 minutes to process daily trades
• 100% accuracy: operational risk of human errors completely removed
• Scalable: digital workers can quickly increase capacity to meet demand peaks