Why Calero Managed Services?
Managed service capabilities are a real growth area, and a lot of our customers are starting to think about or are actively planning to outsource this. Many customers are in expensive locations, such as New York, London or Hong Kong, and at some point, they take a long, hard look at the overhead of having an entire team managing data in that location. Could we outsource this function to free up my staff for more productive analysis? Is there a better option?
Other customers just want to lower their costs and increase the quality of their data management. All of them see our managed services as an opportunity to make gains in these areas through automation and efficiency.
While customers could choose to outsource to low cost areas, and save more, when they partner with us they can rest assured that they are selecting the best in the industry with regards to system knowledge and data quality, while also reducing costs. We’re in the unique position of designing and constantly improving all our own software and configuring it for our customers as new business challenges and opportunities arise.
Customers trust us to look after their data. Since around 65 percent of our customers have been with us for more than 12 years, when they choose to partner with us, it’s with confidence built over many years, trusting our managed services team to look after their data in and around the Market Data Management (MDM) system. Over the last 12-18 months, we’ve enhanced these managed service capabilities for our customers.
Enhanced Task Management
We’ve improved and increased our task management capabilities within the MDM system. We can now track items that need to be executed and completed, categorizing and prioritizing activities, as well as auto assigning those to owners. For instance, when a customer wants an invoice reconciled, that invoice would be emailed directly into our MDM system, a task would be raised, categorized, prioritized, assigned to a team and automatically reconciled and processed. The task record accompanying this invoice would track all the date and time points of the invoice lifecycle—when it was sent, submitted, reconciled, when it was approved and when it was paid. Our customers are getting all the metrics on how fast any task is being completed, and benchmarking this against other tasks for trend analysis and SLA management to identify any bottlenecks.
Better Invoice Management
We’ve also increased all our invoice templating. When we automatically process an invoice, the OCR system pulls all the details from the PDF and turns it into an electronic invoice. We’ve created almost 5,000 market data invoice templates to date, which is why we can manage the onboarding of any type of invoice and streamline the lifecycle of an invoice. This is an important increase in automation for our customers.
Index Licensing Data Management
Another new capability we’ve added within our managed service team is around the managing of index licensing data. Index licensing data is very tricky data to understand, being very different to traditional market data in availability, pricing, procurement and cost. You need to understand if your teams are using the huge number of licenses you may be contracted for, and how you’re being charged. It’s very rare that you’ll be charged a flat rate or per user rate like traditional market data. Contracts can be negotiated quite heavily between the customer and provider, and this has led to us finding and providing support in our systems for over 75 different pricing modules.
The index licensing world is pretty ambiguous. You have to understand what you’re licensed for. Is there any duplicate cost licensing? Are you being invoiced correctly? Are you declaring the correct amount of usage you have made to those providers, so you don’t get fined? Conforming to the increasing number of Regulations and staying compliant still remains the most important focus for financial organizations. Most companies are in danger of breaching regulations and incurring huge fines. The capabilities of our Index License Manager (ILM) builds confidence and control to ensure regulation is managed and risk remains low.
Managing Loads of Data Sets
Calero is now more centrally aligned to take on customers with a wide variety of technology data expense needs. Market Data Management, Telecom, Mobility, Software License/Cloud (SaaS) and Communication Apps (UCaaS) for instance—these teams are now more centrally aligned and able to manage loads of data sets instead of just one.
Carefully Consider the Partner You Choose
Some of our customers in the past have chosen vendors who promised to give them a better deal that appeared attractive at the time, and later they realized that chosen vendor had very little knowledge of our products, processes and how to accurately control data quality. They were asking to be trained on our systems. Those customers soon realize the mistake, and make the switch to us. We know the software, and our developers can recommend and implement changes to fit your business. We’re not the cheapest if you’re comparing us with low cost areas, but we’re incredibly cost-effective if you compare quality, trust, and efficiency. We offer the quality and knowledge you won’t get from a bargain vendor.
