“The pControl investment platform has emerged as a champion for the simultaneous delivery of efficiency, risk reduction and product agility for the global funds and pooled investment industry.”
Investment firms have long known that their fragmented and sometimes fragile technology architectures and strategies are limited in terms of clarity of direction, raw innovation and certainty of outcome. These attributes are required to support the constant demand for margin pressure, competition, product innovation and regulatory change that are the new normal. Milestone Group is a unique powerhouse on the global fintech landscape. The objective of Milestone Group has been to industrialize, harmonize and rationalize industry infrastructure through the provision of a single automation platform that can displace inefficiency and deliver economic return into the value chain across all forms of pooled investment product.
The unique architecture of pControl is directly aligned with industry objectives of efficiency through automation, a reduced risk profile and lower cost of ownership. In most financial services organizations, around 80 percent of the cost base is attributable to headcount and related on-costs. Depending on the function or process under consideration, the pControl platform will generally displace 25 percent to 80 percent of the labor effort associated with tasks and job roles.
In addition, pControl transforms the cost of multiple technology components and layers that may form part of an end to end solution, along with the risk of process failure typically associated with multi-component solutions, handoffs and semi-automated processes requiring manual review or intervention.
The secret sauce that makes this possible is pControl’s unique fusion of data management, rules-based cognitive process management and product awareness, with sophisticated portfolio management, transaction, accounting and asset servicing capabilities in a single environment. The pControl investment platform has emerged as a champion for the simultaneous delivery of efficiency, risk reduction and product agility for the global funds and pooled investment industry. It is operating model agnostic and able to underpin all forms of product structures for institutional investors, asset managers and their administrators across funds, portfolios and mandates on a single global cloud-based infrastructure.
The pControl platform is designed to both reflect and lead the industry requirement to balance responsiveness and adaptability to individual operating models, while setting global industry efficiency benchmarks for standardized processes. A great example of this is the NAV Control solution which automates the end to end process of generating accurate NAVs where a third-party accounting platform is undertaking the NAV calculation. Many organizations previously approached this problem space by surrounding and connecting their fund accounting engines to data management tools, price checking tools, workflow tools and reconciliation tools to achieve increased confidence levels in NAV accuracy.
Clients seek to address a range of business challenges utilizing the pControl platform, but the common themes are to increase efficiency, agility and transparency, reduce risk and operational inertia, and to enable enhanced processing and product capabilities at scale. Some examples include a major UK life company who mentioned that operating the pControl platform is about half of the cost of their outsourcing option, and a major US asset manager who expressed that they know what pControl does is difficult because they attempted to build a solution on four occasions before deploying pControl.
Looking towards the future, Milestone Group is broadening the type of clients covered in each region, with particular emphasis on asset owners. Asset managers including OCIO’s and administrators are serviced in all regions, while life companies and pension funds have to date not been serviced in North America other than via administrators. Milestone is also in an advanced stage of developing a new and exciting global digitalization strategy for funds and pooled investment businesses, with pControl SmartSourcing providing a tangible initial extension to their cloud capability which includes fully managed data operations.
