Shawn Smith, CIO at South Africa’s third largest asset manager, Stanlib, had a problem. With R299 billion in assets under management, the team was finding it increasingly difficult to provide fund reports to its institutional clients.

“Our basic monthly reports were fine,” says Smith. “But we started having issues around our quarterly reports.” This was a much more manual process than it should’ve been, he says. Often, elements were hard-coded, which at times led to questions around the integrity of some of the reports.