Threadneedle live with DSTi’s HiPortfolio/3

DST International (DSTi), the leader in business solutions for financial services industry, announced today that it fully endorsed the recent decision of Threadneedle, a long standing customer of DSTi and a major user of HiPortfolio, to outsource its Investment Operations function to JPMorgan, another long standing customer of DSTi and its largest user of HiPortfolio.

Syd Wilkinson, Threadneedle’s Director of Change and responsible for managing its recent outsourcing initiatives, said “One of the key considerations in our choice of JPMorgan was its use of and strategic commitment to HiPortfolio as a key component in its service offering. In the short term, we see this as substantially de-risking the transition from an in-house to an outsourced solution. Longer term, it provides us with the confidence that JPMorgan, through the use of DSTi technology, will continue to meet Threadneedle’s evolving business requirements and aggressive growth plans. For business reasons, but also in anticipation of entering into a new outsourcing arrangement, we migrated from HiPortfolio/2 to HiPortfolio/3 in January 2006.”

Toni Jensen, Threadneedle’s head of investment management systems and responsible for the migration to HiPortfolio/3 said, “A big business driver for the move to HiPortfolio/3 was the need to support new International Accounting Standards. HiPortfolio/3 also provided us with several technological improvements that enabled greater business efficiencies and scalability to all areas of our back office operation.

“We have already witnessed efficiencies from HiPortfolio/2. Following our acquisition by American Express, we undertook the management of some of their mutual funds and were able to seamlessly take them onto HiPortfolio,” he continued. “Now that we have bedded in and gone fully live with HiPortfolio/3, our systems and processes are in excellent condition which enables us to complete more easily the outsourcing process of our back office to JPMorgan”.

Mike Winn, DSTi’s CEO, said, “Threadneedle and JPMorgan are excellent examples of asset managers and outsourcers who have opted for HiPortfolio/3 because of our own commitment to our products. Each year we spend over 100,000 mandays ensuring our products remain the best in the business. To date we have implemented HiPortfolio/3 at more than 35 organisations around the world.”

Threadneedle has implemented HiPortfolio/3 in its Swindon office where 130 users work with the system