MUFG Investor Services mitigates risk while improving customer trust and retention

Gaining and retaining customer trust is an essential part of asset servicing. MUFG Investor Services, much like its peers, followed industry-standard processes for calculating carried interest. These processes were inherently time-consuming, manual, and spreadsheet-based. Each MUFG office used a different model to complete the calculations, introducing inconsistency, inefficiency, and risk due to data accuracy and integrity issues. “Getting the carried interest calculation wrong not only impacts our reputation, but also our clients’ profit and loss,” explains Mike Dickey, Head of Core Product.

Automating the process in a controlled environment would, therefore, mitigate risk and improve efficiency, and also differentiate MUFG from its competitors by gaining and retaining customers with data that customers can trust. MUFG created that controlled, automated environment with Anaplan.

MUFG implemented the Anaplan platform with the help of specialist partner Lionpoint Group, including enablement of MUFG’s business users to own and operate the solution on their own.

With Anaplan, Dickey reports, MUFG can process carried-interest calculations 85–90% faster and provide clients with forecasting scenarios through “what-if” analyses. “Calculations that once took four to five hours can be done in 30 minutes with Anaplan,” says Dickey. “Also, we can set up models 50% faster than before.” With 500 models in MUFG’s portfolio, fast set up means quicker responses to customer inquiries.

Beyond the numbers, automation and control of the calculations eliminate the operational and reputational risk inherent in the company’s old processes. Anaplan dashboards allow the MUFG team to provide clients with a web-based view into how carried interest is calculated—an impossibility before. “Anaplan has enabled us to create a differentiator out of what is usually considered a commodity service,” notes Dickey. “This helps us retain customers through increased trust.”

MUFG chose Anaplan for its real-time, in-memory computing and analysis capabilities, as well as its easy-to-use user interface and ability to integrate with MUFG’s existing platforms without extensive IT support.

The company plans to provide its customers with a mirror image of its internal model, allowing customers to perform their own scenario-based forecasting. This will further differentiate MUFG’s asset servicing from its competitors. An Anaplan Center of Excellence has been established to streamline future rollouts to other asset strategies and overall corporate financial planning and analysis(FP&A).

Anaplan is one of the few tools we have encountered that does exactly what we asked it to do,” Dickey concludes. “It has allowed us a level of flexibility that we did not previously have.