Recognos financial

Delta Data Software and Recognos Financial form Integrated Technology Partners (ITP) to provide the mutual fund industry with the data and documents required to comply with new SEC regulations governing mutual funds. Read more…

Integrated Technology Partners (ITP), a joint venture of Delta Data Software and Recognos Financial, was founded to address the mutual fund industry’s need to easily access fund data and distribute fund disclosure documents. The result of that effort is the Mutual Fund Information Portal (MFIP). The MFIP is an industry utility designed to provide the industry participants and their clients with ALL the Mutual Fund Information necessary to support all aspects of the business from start to finish.

The MFIP is a repository of compliance documents that include summary prospectus, statutory prospectus, SAI, shareholder reports and other disclosure documents that can be used by both Fund Managers and Distributors in flexible and innovative ways to satisfy their specific internal informational needs as well as their compliance obligations around disclosure document delivery.

Additionally, MFIP provides a reliable and cost-effective source of critical mutual fund information directly from SEC-filings, ensuring that the integrity of the source data is maintained and easily verifiable. MFIP requires no data entry, no data cleansing and provides industry consistency by showing all parties the same source data. The mutual fund industry currently incurs direct costs in excess of $300 million per year for data subscriptions and to print and mail prospectuses and other documents. ITP’s goal is to reduce these direct expenses by 50% within the first two years, and up to 60% to 70% in year three.

Alternative Investments refers to a category of investment types that are difficult and problematic to process for all types of firms that have responsibilities associated with them. The roles firms play relative to alternative investments differ, i.e. administrator, custodian, guarantor, etc. Consequently the data required by each firm is dependant on their particular role in the process. Asset types included in the category are Hedge Funds, Fund of Hedge Funds, Private Equity Funds, Variable Rate Annuities, Derivatives, REITS, Credit Default Swaps and several other investment types that lack the structure and regulation associated with more traditional investment types. It is this lack of structure and regulation that results in no reporting standards. This means that the various documents arrive with no consistency of format nor pre-defined structure. Consequently, each firm involved in any aspect of the process is required to devote human resources to the time consuming and tedious task of extracting the information necessary to meet their particular processing requirements. Recognos Financial has developed an application that handles the extraction process and allows valuable resources to focus on more important tasks.

Recognos Financial has developed an application that creates structured data from unstructured documents. While the application can be applied to any type of unstructured text document, for Alternative Investments it includes: Offering Statements/Prospectuses, Shareholder Reports, Subscriptions, etc, in short – all of the documents required to meet the specific functions of a particular firm based on their role in the process.

Currently the function is labor intensive with the overwhelming majority of time spent by the clerical staff in reading and extracting key data from the hundreds of reports and documents received on a regular basis from fund managers, administrators, and other sources. This extracted data is then keyed into spreadsheets or other applications that feed internal applications. The Alternative Investments application does most of the tedious work by performing the data extraction and automatically populating required applications with the appropriate data. In addition, errors are reduced through the elimination of the re-keying of data. A summary of the process is essentially as follows:

• Receive e-mails, faxes and hardcopy documents from fund managers and/or administrators, etc. Hardcopy documents are scanned and merged with faxes – these documents are then processed via OCR and converted to text. E-mail attachments are stripped off and merged with the other document types.
• The text documents are then processed through the Recognos Financial syntactically and semantically based parsing agents where the key data elements are extracted. The results are displayed interactively in conjunction with the original document. Any exceptions are identified and directed to a work queue where they are reviewed by the staff.
• Resulting data is then available for review and export to both internal applications and a semantic data repository.

An average group of ten clerical staff can be reduced by as much as 70%. The remaining staff are focused on exceptions and the group functions that require a greater level of expertise. The resultant data can also be used as part of the firm’s counter party risk program as the holdings within a given fund are identified and a security master of these privately held firms is maintained. Supplementing that security master with data from external sources (i.e. D&B) provides a reasonable assessment of the stability of the firms in which the fund, and ultimately the client is invested.

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Recognos Financial enters in strategic partnership with Metatomix to develop Semantic WEB applications for the Financial Services Industry. Read more…

METATOMIX EXTENDS REACH WITH NEW STRATEGIC PARTNERS

Company’s Powerful Semantic Technology Will Complement Financial Services Solutions from Recognos Financial and Criminal Justice IS Solutions from DOBBS, RAM & Co.

Dedham, Mass., February 2, 2009 – Metatomix, Inc. www.metatomix.com, a leading provider of semantic solutions www.metatomix.com/knowledgecenter/semantic.php to justice and public safety www.metatomix.com/360applications/index.php, financial services, manufacturing and life sciences organizations, today announced Recognos Financial and DOBBS, RAM & Co. (DRC) have joined its Partner Program. Recognos Financial will base its semantic solutions for customers in the financial services industry on the Metatomix semantic platform. DRC will offer its customers the option to integrate Metatomix’s technology with their existing criminal justice infrastructure to enable far greater, more efficient data sharing.

“Recognos Financial has extensive real-world experience helping financial services customers solve sophisticated data challenges with innovative technology,” said Drew Warren, president of Recognos Financial. “With its own proven success in this industry, Metatomix brings to this equation a semantic technology solution that plays a key part in helping us address these customer challenges.”

“We are very excited about our partnership with Metatomix,” said DRC CEO Ronald B. McCrae, “and look forward to a bright and prosperous future together. DRC has developed deep expertise in criminal justice information systems through work with customers such as the IRS, for whom we implemented and maintain the State Retrieval Subsystem for the IRS’s Electronic Filing System. This partnership enables us to offer Metatomix’s unique technology, skills and experience to our own customer base.”

“Strategic partners are a critical element in our past and future success,” said Metatomix CEO Jeff Dickerson. “We continue to invest heavily in our partner program at all levels. Recognos Financial and DRC provide solutions that are complementary with our own value proposition at both the technology and business level. We look forward to working closely with both organizations to provide mutual customers with innovative technology that dramatically increases their efficiency while also cutting costs.”

Recognos Financial will use Metatomix’s semantic solution to help financial services companies correlate the very large volume of detailed data included in lengthy and numerous prospectuses. With the Metatomix solution, this data will be presented to financial services companies’ customers on-line in a highly interactive, intuitive format. Metatomix’s semantic technology will also correlate and integrate data between both internal and third party sources without requiring changes to existing systems. The end result is a solution that rapidly and intelligently integrates vast internal and external data sources in a format conducive to analysis.