Denmark’s Pensam selects SimCorp as alternatives manager

Denmark’s labour market pension fund, Pensam, has selected SimCorp as its alternatives manager.

The €18bn pension fund is now live on SimCorp Dimension’s Alternative Investments Manager. It is expected that implementation will be complete in less than three months, with the pension fund planning to run all of its alternatives assets (€4bn) on SimCorp’s alternatives solution.

The fund, which has around 477,000 members, and an increasing alternatives allocation, suffered from lack of efficiencies in its alternatives investments workflows. Given the many nuances of alternative investments data, it struggled with processes such as risk management, performance and reporting.

This is not an isolated case - recent SimCorp commissioned survey of 100 buy-side heads of operations found that as many as 80 per cent want to see alternatives consolidated onto a single front-to-back platform, to achieve cost efficiencies and critically improve data and operational support of alternatives, such as private debt, real estate and infrastructure.

Since going live on SimCorp’s Alternative Investment Manager, Pensam has removed several siloed systems and moved onto a consolidated platform, providing validated information seamlessly across the organization. Reducing systems, together with hours of arduous manual reconciliation, has eliminated much of the considerable operational risk the pension fund had accumulated over the years. At the same time, centralizing alternatives data has had a significant effect on Pensam’s ability to accomplish timely decomposition of portfolios.

As a result, Pensam has been able to refocus resources to more value-added tasks, from financial planning to asset allocation optimization. Performing analytics, using the solution’s advanced and configurable dashboard, has also enabled the pension fund to gain a deeper understanding of its alternatives allocations. Pensam can now easily view and edit all transactions, positions and securities, as well as track performance based on a variety of criteria, delivering improved risk management and enabling Pensam to make more informed investment decisions.

Commenting, Pensam application manager, Thomas Anker, said: “We are extremely pleased with the positive impact that SimCorp Dimension and system consolidation has had on our business. SimCorp’s Alternative Investments Manager has been instrumental in reshaping our approach to alternatives investments, delivering the real-time overview of investment data that is crucial to our investment decision making. With phase one successfully completed, we are looking at upcoming modules where we can track changes in our exposure and gain more thorough insights into our portfolios. Going forward, this will be a real game changer for us.”

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