South Africa’s RMB asset management picks LatentZero’s Capstone front-office suite

Next-generation front-office system deployment is the way forward for South-African fund management companies

RMB Asset management, a division of one of South Africa’s largest JSE-listed financial services groups FirstRand, has successfully implemented LatentZero Capstone™ to manage its assets of more than ZAR200bn (£15bn). Capstone is LatentZero’s front-office suite for buy-side institutions and its implementation was lead by LatentZero’s South African partner, Peresys.

RMB Asset Management favours the Capstone suite for their multi-asset class investments, including its equities, fixed income and derivatives businesses. Capstone Minerva, a next generation OMS and trading system enables RMB Asset Management to manage workflows, receive market data feeds and place orders with counterparties, all in real time. Capstone Tesseract™, LatentZero’s modelling and decision support tool, allows asset managers to optimise the performance of their portfolios and maximise returns. Capstone Sentinel will assist RMB Asset Management to manage compliance against its pre-trade embargo lists. Once fully implemented, Sentinel will integrate into the firm’s proprietary systems, ensuring compliance across all pre and post-trade activities.

Nick Harrall, Director of Professional Services at LatentZero™ noted, "This implementation is a real win for us. RMB Asset Management is the first asset management company in South Africa to deploy a next generation front-office system and by choosing Capstone they have a proven solution."

Stephen Jones, Head of IT at RMB Asset Management commented, "The Capstone product suite provides significant additional strategic and tactical investment management process capabilities to RMB Asset Management front and middle-office staff. The streamlined trading cycle improves RMB Asset Management’s tactical trading process with the additional benefits of reduced risks. RMB Asset Management is committed to implementing solutions that will further enhance the service offering we provide to our clients. With the additional deployed functionality, we can consider further innovative solutions that allow us to excel in our industry segment. While trading product suites are typically complex, LatentZero provides an architecturally coherent solution that simplifies support."

Stuart Campbell, South African Head of Sales at Peresys explained, "The speed and success of the implementation at RMB Asset Management validates Peresys’ choice of LatentZero as our partner in the provision of front office solutions to our buy-side customers in South Africa. LatentZero Capstone will bring comprehensive and extensible functionality to these clients as it is open and easily accessible from other in-house and external applications. The salient features of the Capstone implementation have been its flexibility within time constraints, and its seamless integration into South Africa’s leading back office systems. Further assisting users of the system to achieve maximum efficiency and best execution, is the integration between Capstone and Peresys’ FIX enabled Business Process Network (BPN), which offers connectivity to trading counterparties globally.

South African fund managers have been watching this project with interest, and we believe many of them will follow suit over the next two years in rolling out new generation order management, modeling and compliance solutions like Capstone."

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About LatentZero
LatentZero is a global technology firm that specializes in developing complete front-office solutions for the buy-side community. LatentZero’s suite of products, known collectively as Capstone, is used by seven of the world’s top 10 asset management organizations. More than 3,500 portfolio mangers, traders and compliance officers worldwide rely on Capstone to manage assets in excess of $8 trillion. For additional information, please visit
http://www.latentzero.com

About Peresys
Peresys is a South African-based software solutions provider to the financial markets community, including Exchanges, Members and Fund Managers, with a specific focus on FIX enabled services and trading related applications from Indications of Interest to Contract Notes. Through its points of presence in London and New York, Peresys connects its Hub and Spoke offerings into the premier global FIX networks, thus ensuring that clients can reach their trading counterparties virtually anywhere in the world. The offering is high speed, reliable and cost effective.

Peresys' product suite also includes applications for Equity Trading into JSE SETS, Securities Lending and Borrowing, Portfolio Management, Research Dissemination and Back to Front Office Integration.
http://www.peresys.com

About RMB Asset Management
http://www.rmbam.co.za

Press Contacts
LatentZero
The Americas - Gail Romano
gromano@latentzero.com
+1 617.235.1020

UK and Europe - Melanie Smith
msmith@latentzero.com
+44 (0) 20 7462 4232

France and Spain - Rhéa Hokayem
rhokayem@latentzero.com
+44 (0) 20 7462 4200

SPARX Communications (PR Agency)
Alastair Turner
alastair@sparxgroup.co.uk
+44 (0) 1753 893 000

Peresys - London
Richard Bell +44 (0) 207 100 9911
richard@peresys.co.uk

Peresys – South Africa
Glenn Wilson +27 (0) 21 657 8804
glenn@peresys.co.za