Achmea

Achmea Investment Management is an independent division of Achmea, a non-listed Dutch insurance group with a cooperative tradition and a PRI signatory.

Achmea IM has supported pension funds in the Netherlands with tailored solutions for over 60 years. The group manages assets of EUR 180 billion for customers including its parent company’s balance sheet.

They have been relying on SimCorp for front, middle and back-office operations since 2003. 

The business case

Achmea IM was facing data challenges with corporate actions processes due to the significant increase in the number of portfolios and positions over recent years.

These growing data volumes led to multiple and burdensome manual processes which drastically increased both operational and key person risks.

The solution

To address those challenges, in 2021 Achmea IM decided to launch a new project to streamline corporate actions processes and enable the group to scale.

After a rigorous selection process, Achmea IM chose the SimCorp Corporate Actions Manager because of its proven functional capabilities, its straight through processing capabilities and its complete integration front-to-back within SimCorp Dimension.

The project started in May 2022 and was completed on time and on budget with the deployment of SimCorp’s Corporate Actions Manager standard package. Achmea IM refers to it as a “top shelf project”, meaning it was completed as planned with excellent collaboration between the two teams.

The results

Achmea IM has realized the following benefits since deploying SimCorp’s Corporate Actions Manager:

• Very high process automation, enabling the teams to focus mainly on exception handling
• Better business insights for the team due to the strong integration of the Corporate Actions Manager within the rest of the investment value chain managed in SimCorp Dimension
• Improved timeliness as custodians’ instructions are managed from one place
• Easy blocking process across custodians with a direct update to the front office thereby providing full transparency to Portfolio Managers about blocked positions
• Increased quality of corporate actions processing. One example is the creation of dedicated transaction codes for each corporate action event type which provides more transparency and allows the teams to book corporate actions in a more efficient and logical manner than before
• Smooth and efficient handling of the modification or re-creation of corporate action transactions
• Strongly reduced operational risk due to the elimination of manuals tasks and a decrease of key person risk.

The stronger automation has enabled Achmea IM's teams to focus on more value-added tasks which is key to retain talent.

Quick Facts

AuM: EUR 180 bn (as of 30/06/2023)
Headquarters: Zeist, the Netherlands 
Employees: 350
Website: https://www.achmeainvestmentmanagement.nl/english