CASE STUDY

Cornerstone Advisors

Project Overview

Cornerstone Advisors is a top 50 U.S.-based wealth manager with more than $2 billion AUM.

Cornerstone Advisors (Cornerstone) was seeking to grow through diversification of investment products. As part of this it needed to streamline back office processes to ensure scalability. Prior to launching a multi-year initiative, the firm underwent an extensive review of its back-office to identify where operations could be streamlined and reengineered for optimum scalability and cost efficiency.

Cornerstone discovered that to deliver a higher standard of service, while scaling its business, it needed to retire a legacy database and migrate all client information onto the Advent APX platform. The firm also determined that it could achieve the highest return on investment by outsourcing back-office trade reconciliation, and performance history updating for client reporting, to a third-party provider.

Empaxis was selected, over other service providers, to take over trade reconciliation and client reporting. This was due to:

  • Extensive knowledge of Advent products
  • Ability to understand Cornerstone’s business model and growth initiatives
  • Ability to custom fit a solution onto Cornerstone’s existing technology infrastructure
  • Minimization of disruption to Business Operations
Our engagement with Empaxis is probably the equivalent of between one and two full-time staff. The scalability they have provided to our business is tremendous. Whether we have 500 or 5,000clients, we know we will be able to provide accurate reporting in a timely manner. We were also able to get our client management team out of the tedious and potentially risky business of manually entering in operational information about clients.That alone has provided us tremendous value.

– Aimee Hauff, Director of Investment Operations

Middle- and Back-Office Outsourcing

Within two weeks of engagement, Empaxis had taken over Cornerstone’s trade reconciliation process, producing overnight, weekly and monthly reports that reconciled more than 10 custodian banks with Cornerstone’s Advent APX system.

Empaxis also assisted in the migration and reconciliation of data off of the legacy database and onto the AdventAPX system.

Empaxis employed its trusted method to ensure the most efficient and effective solution for Cornerstone. Firstly, the solution was designed according to the specific needs and opportunities. The solution is performed 24 x 7 x 365. It is managed over time to ensure an optimum service.

Key Challenges

Solution

Results

  • Provision of overnight trade reconciliation reports, with the Empaxis quality assurance overlay
  • Reduction in the time needed to on-board new clients onto APX: from more than one week to one day
  • Reduction in the time needed to produce monthly client reports: from 15 days to 5 days for basic reports, and from 20 days to 10 days for complex reports