New SimCorp Dimension Release enables better investment decision making

SimCorp, a leading provider of investment management solutions and services for the global financial services industry, has released version 5.9 of SimCorp Dimension, the first of two annual releases. Along with numerous other modules, new features, and further integration across the entire value chain, the release introduces new advanced additions to SimCorp’s Asset Manager.

The analytics functionality in the Asset Manager is now enriched with accounting analytics and tax lots enabling portfolio managers to measure and analyze data to better advise their clients on the accounting and tax implications of their investment decisions. The accounting analytics are particularly valuable to the insurance industry, and the tax lot visibility is particularly beneficial in countries such as France and the US where asset owners are mandated to report profit and loss on tax lot level.

The release also introduces a new online compliance application in the Asset Manager. Designed to complement the existing pre-trade compliance workflow and serve as an aid for making the right investment decisions, the new compliance application provides a detailed view of exposure limits and how much room for further investments these allow.

Finally, the new release introduces User Defined Stress Tests in the Asset Manager. Stress testing is an important risk management tool for testing a portfolio's readiness for extreme fluctuations in the market. The User Defined Stress Tests make it easy for portfolio managers to simulate changes to both holdings and market data in order to analyze the impact of changes in the market.

“We invest more than 20% of our annual revenue in R&D and in recent years a substantial part of that investment has gone into our front office solution based on the integrated IBOR. As a result, we now find ourselves able to compete with best-of-breed solutions in the market, but it does not stop here,” says Marc Schröter, SVP and head of SimCorp Product Management. ”Future releases will advance the front office solution and its integration to other parts of the system even further, all with the aim of easing our clients’ ability to operate and strive in complex market conditions.”

Other important additions to SimCorp Dimension introduced in the release include:

• Middle office: Factor based Fixed Income Performance Attribution (FIPA) module that enables asset managers and their clients to evaluate the decisions made on different levels of an investment process for fixed income portfolios.
• Back Office: IFRS 9 Phase 2 Impairments module, which based on internal ratings and imported cash flows containing the anticipated losses from the company’s risk department can calculate and book credit loss allowances in a simple and straightforward task.
• Back Office: Reconciliation Manager, which wraps existing functionality into one central access point for all reconciliation processes, offers significantly improved workflows, and is fully integrated with SimCorp’s IBOR for efficient resolution of breaks and exceptions.
• Data Warehouse: Updates that empower business users by giving them easy access to adding new sources of data to the warehouse and to extracting data in the format needed for business intelligence, reporting etc. without the often time-consuming involvement of IT.

The next version of SimCorp Dimension will be released in August 2016.