Schroders – Save 5,000 Hours with IA & RPA in Asset Management 

Founded in 1804, Schroders is one of the world’s largest independent investment management firms in financial services. As of June 30, 2022, assets under management were US$939.2 billion. With an established automation program, Schroders was continually looking to innovate. They asked, “Can we rethink processes entirely to create outcomes our human employees would find impossible?” Ultimately, the impossible is what they achieved with intelligent automation from SS&C Blue Prism.

Challenge

As an investment management company, Schroders is committed to aligning its goals with those of its clients. Getting accurate data from clients and investment managers was of critical importance to the business. 

The company communicates this data to clients across Singapore and Hong Kong for Schroders’ Equity Reporting. Schroders wanted to provide its equities team with up-to-date insights and information, but with 12 different sources to draw from, the possibility of real-time reporting was difficult. The impracticality of recruiting more employees led Schroders to wonder if another method would be feasible.

Another challenge was the global pandemic, which created immense market volatility. Fund managers required real-time data to make important and timely investment decisions, but the system had no visualization capabilities, so they had to manually extract and interpret the data.

Solution

Having worked for over four years to establish a solid automation program across its business, including 300 digital workers, Schroders wanted to go further. They looked to intelligent automation to deliver outcomes that exceeded those its human workforce could achieve. This enabled the firm to eliminate the need for its workforce to gather data and information from local files manually.

For instance, in extracting information for low-price securities, the solution identifies information within PDF documents and sends it further downstream for RPA processes. Each report averaged over 300 pages, with each page holding more than 40 lines of information. The process was cumbersome. Digital workers were brought in to consolidate the reports and to automatically extract the data from each page.

SS&C Blue Prism digital workers have saved 5,000 hours each month across the entire automation program and have given employees time to focus on other tasks that deliver insight-driven outcomes. Today, for Equity Risk and Performance Analytics Automated Reporting alone, the infrastructure can support the consolidation and generation of eight reports across 120 portfolios from multiple applications.

Additionally, the automation team was able to implement a solution for delivering data to fund managers within five days. Digital workers now extract a report from Schroders’ internal system, manipulate the data, and publish it on Tableau. It was critical to have this solution online quickly at a time when the market was experiencing a once-in-a-generation disruption.

Download the full case study now to understand more on how digital workers helped Schroders' continued success.