electrainfo.com – New York –Electra Information Systems (Electra), the leading provider of state-of-the-art reconciliation solutions to the asset management industry, has introduced an intuitive and highly efficient NAV (net asset value) reconciliation workspace that supports the loading of NAV-related data from any electronic source.
The latest enhancements to the award-winning Electra Reconciliation solution come after gaining an in-depth understanding of how investment managers address the NAV reconciliation process. Investment managers that continue to use spreadsheets struggle with the reconciliation of a portfolio’s NAV, a critical component of fund pricing, client billing and reporting. Historically, the NAV reconciliation process has involved manually gathering and populating NAV data into multiple spreadsheets that contain complex formulas that are maintained and understood by just a few individuals within an organization. Data entry errors, security and control risk, and the lack of an exception management workflow are inherent to this process.
In response to the functional gaps found in Excel and also to tremendous customer demand, Electra has once again delivered cutting-edge technology that dramatically improves the overall NAV reconciliation experience. By aggregating and normalizing both external and internal NAV-related data based on user-defined rules, Electra Reconciliation has met the most significant challenges associated with this traditionally arduous process. Electra Reconciliation now allows firms to group together the various NAV buckets that include securities transactions, positions, receivables, liabilities and other cash balances to gain greater visibility into the makeup of a fund’s total net assets. Electra Reconciliation also identifies the materiality of each bucket’s variance as it relates to the overall NAV of a fund, allowing users to focus immediately on those that hold the largest exposure. All of this work is performed in a highly controlled, fully audited environment where non-technical users can easily configure and maintain the rules associated with their own particular NAV reconciliation process.
“After hearing and seeing how investment managers have addressed the NAV reconciliation process in Excel, it opened our eyes to their challenges and to what was needed for investment managers to move away from Excel,” said John Landry, CEO, Electra. “We pride ourselves on both listening carefully to our clients’ needs as well as treating them as members of the Electra product management team. As a result, we have been able to introduce a ground-breaking innovation for NAV reconciliations for the buy side.”