Investment Conversions & ConsultingChapter one · in which a deadline approaches
Once upon
a deadline
Every difficult conversion becomes a good story. Eventually. For over thirty years, institutional investors have called ICC when the system must change, the data can't be trusted, or the deadline won't move. We arrive at the tense chapter and stay until the ending is boring — which, in investment operations, is the happy kind.
The plot, in five acts
Chapter two · the plots we know by heart
Three stories we get called into. Usually around midnight.
Story No. 1 — The system
A platform or vendor has to change. Selection, conversion, integration, testing and cutover — sometimes turning several systems into one, and doing it so cleanly that nobody downstream notices it happened.
Story No. 2 — The data
The numbers that wouldn't agree. The front office says one thing, the back office says another, and the auditors would like a word. We find the discrepancies, put a name against every one, and stay until every side of every ledger agrees.
Story No. 3 — The date
Regulatory, contractual, or promised to the board — the date is fixed and the plan is not. Accelerating achievement is the specialty. We plan backwards from the deadline and land on it.
Chapter three ·
the tools of the trade
For the moments when platforms, data and operating models have to move — and the deadline, unhelpfully, does not.
Conversions & implementations
Every record migrated, tested and proven. Trial balances that balance. Auditors that nod.
Data management & quality
One version of the truth, with a name against every piece of it.
Vendor selection
Independent advice from people who already know how each platform behaves in year seven.
Merger consolidation
Two of everything becomes one of everything, without a restatement.
Upgrades, testing & training
Releases proven safe before they are allowed near production.
Risk, controls & oversight
Independent eyes for boards, sponsors and directors who would like a straight answer.
An interlude · before the next chapter
Before you build anything on your investment data, someone should look at the data.
Most institutions are being asked to do something ambitious with the operation this year — consolidate it, automate it, report out of it faster. The ambition is never the risk. The risk is the thirty years of data underneath it: reconciled by hand, patched around a conversion in 2011, governed by a convention that lives in the head of somebody who retired in 2014.
The Operational Health Check is a fixed-scope, two-week look at whether your data, platforms and controls could actually carry what you are about to put on top of them. One senior practitioner, a written roadmap, and nothing to buy at the end of it. Most technology problems turn out to be data problems wearing a better suit.
It is the same job we have had since 1993: establish what is true before anyone builds on it.
The moral is always the same:
bring senior people in early.
ICC was founded in 1993 on a simple idea — that investment-system change goes wrong in the gap between the business and the technology, so your consultants had better be fluent in both.
We are independent of every vendor and every audit firm. The practitioners you meet are the practitioners who deliver, and when the last chapter is written they hand your team the pen.
Chapter four ·
how the story ends
The same way, every time. On purpose.
We listen to the whole mess
Accounting, operations, data and technology in one honest assessment. We sit with the people doing the work and ask the deeply unglamorous question — what do you do when it doesn't work? No finding gets softened for the deck.
We plan backwards from the date
The deadline is the plot. Selection, conversion and testing are sequenced so the ending is never in doubt, and you hear about a threat to the date three months out rather than three days out.
We reconcile until both sides agree
Every record converted, proven and signed off, with the variances explained rather than quietly absorbed. Trial balances that balance. Auditors that nod.
We hand your team the pen
Knowledge transfer is the last chapter, not an afterthought. Your people run the system, keep the controls and understand the reasoning. We go and find another elephant.
Chapter five ·
the cast
Insurers, banks, asset managers, mutual funds, pension plans and government funds — trusted where being wrong is expensive, plus the specialists we have placed inside them.
Chapter six · the library
Also in the collection
Curium Data Systems
ICC is an accredited implementation partner for Curium's data-management platform in North America — independently verifiable, unusually for bedtime stories.
View partner listingTell us
your story.
The merger, the migration, the numbers that won't agree, the date that won't move. Start at any chapter — we'll tell you candidly how it ends. Senior practitioners are standing by, which is the modern version of what our founders used to promise.
Discuss your project +1.603.401.6697