Bank of Thailand secures integral phase of Corporate Excellence Strategy with SimCorp Dimension go-live

SimCorp, a leading provider of investment management solutions and services to the global financial services industry, has announced that The Bank of Thailand, the country’s central bank with USD 226 billion in reserves, has successfully implemented and is live on SimCorp Dimension.

The go-live sees The Bank of Thailand running SimCorp Dimension across its reserve management and monetary policy operations, evolving to front to back management of all invested asset classes, on one core platform.

The bank joins some of the leading central banks around the globe, using SimCorp Dimension, including the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago and the Central Bank of the Republic of Austria (OeNB). With the transformation to one core platform implemented both on time and on budget, it is now primed with increased scalability and multi-asset coverage, to readily adapt to new market conditions and explore global multi-asset investments.

With Thailand forming one of the region’s most advanced emerging markets economies, the go-live sees The Bank of Thailand leading the way, with reforms across risk management, performance and attribution, compliance, collateral management, settlement and accounting. Leveraging SimCorp’s market-leading Investment Book of Record (IBOR) it has achieved a unified, up-to-date ‘whole office’ view of all assets. This has resulted in enhancements to both risk management and compliance workflows and greater governance.

The deployment of an in-house solution together with the freeing up of valuable resources, has given the bank greater control over its data and enabled higher levels of automation. The cross-functional support from SimCorp Dimension has delivered the following benefits:

• Highly automated workflows minimizing the need for human intervention in transaction processing, reducing operational risk and generating more reliable and informed investment decision making.

• The integration of SimCorp’s Order Manager with Bank of Thailand’s execution platform replaces voice conversations and manual post-trade capture between execution and order management.

• SimCorp’s source-agnostic investment management tool provides fully automated market data from a variety of sources, without the need for manual data transfer.

• Integrated IBOR delivering one core source of data, minimizing the need for manual reconciliation and error-prone tasks. This includes the replacement of manual intervention with integrated, real-time positions for pre-trade compliance.
• The reduction of several fragmented systems to create a consolidated accounting general ledger, using one data set across both IBOR and the Accounting Book of Record (ABOR). This standardization has led to a consistent set of holdings, while maintaining the bank’s highly customized general ledger functions within SimCorp Dimension, ensures it continues to meet Thai government Accounting Laws and Policies.

Wongjan Sripaoraya, Head of Reserve Management Department, Bank of Thailand comments: “With a thorough understanding of our needs and close collaboration throughout the whole implementation, SimCorp has delivered this project within the timeframe and on budget. Equally important, we now have a better holistic view of our reserves management, enabling a thorough analysis of our data, which we have been striving for. SimCorp’s commitment to delivering this, together with the many benefits we have realized through consolidation, have proved invaluable. We look forward to continuing this valuable partnership in the future.”

Oliver Johnson, Managing Director of SimCorp Asia Pacific comments: “It is an honour to have the opportunity to establish a long-term partnership with The Bank of Thailand and welcome this esteemed institution to the SimCorp community. As a trusted partner to banks and sovereign wealth funds across the region and globally, we strongly believe in the bank’s strategic decision to address its technology in-house. It forms a leading example among asset owner peers across Asia, who are faced with increasing risk build-up and striving to improve their investment management capabilities. The region’s growing reserves and market complexity will continue to strengthen the insourcing trend and increase the need for integrated, multi-asset investment management solutions.”