Anima SGR and Prima SGR Merger Chooses Charles River IMS as a Single Multi-Asset Solution to Support Business Objectives of New Combined Entity

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Charles River Development (Charles River) a front- and middle-office investment financial solutions provider, today announced that Anima SGR (Anima) has selected the Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) to support the portfolio management, order management, execution management, and compliance needs of the new combined entity following the merger of Anima and Prima SGR (Prima). The merger officially takes place on January 1, 2012, and will create the largest independent asset manager in Italy.

“The Italian market is seeing considerable consolidation, as organizations seek to compete globally and to reduce costs and ultimately improve return to their investors”

“Charles River IMS provides Anima with a single enterprise solution for portfolio management, trading and compliance that continues to meet the company’s business needs as it adds new asset types, grows its number of users and portfolios, and is expected to meet increasingly complex regulatory requirements,” said Roberto Panzeri, CIO, Anima. Ugo Cornacchia, Project Leader, Anima adds, “Ultimately, the Charles River IMS gives us the peace-of-mind that our chosen technology platform can facilitate our ever-changing business requirements allowing us to focus on our clients, not our infrastructure.”

Anima selected the Charles River IMS because it provides a single enterprise system that is able to:

• Support a myriad of asset classes required by the combined entity including equity, fixed income, OICR, REPO, Equity index futures, bond futures and portfolio swaps instruments, as well as total return SWAP (index and equity), index options, equity options, bond options, CCY options, OTC options and hedge funds.
• Run compliance at any point during the trade cycle and provide a complete audit trail to satisfy the regulatory requirements of the Bank of Italy and the Italian Securities Exchange Commission (CONSOB).
• Accommodate new users and geographies starting with 30 additional users in Milan and Dublin.
• Integrate with multiple back-office systems and other legacy systems, supporting a complex merger process.

“The Italian market is seeing considerable consolidation, as organizations seek to compete globally and to reduce costs and ultimately improve return to their investors,” said Jon Steward, managing director- EMEA, Charles River Development. “Using Charles River IMS as a single consolidated front-office system is a no compromise solution to the challenge of balancing strategic, best-of-breed functionality needs with efficient and cost-effective IT mandates.” Charles River was originally deployed by Bipiemme in 2007 and became the system of choice for Anima after it was acquired by Bipiemme in 2008.

About Anima

In December 2010, Anima Sgr and Prima Sgr came together to become the largest independent asset management company in Italy, which will operate using the Anima brand. Anima is owned by three shareholders; Clessidra Sgr, Bipiemme and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. It has over €40bn assets under management, and more than 110 mutual funds. The strategic alliance between Anima and Prima to create a single entity will bring together and ehance both organisations’ points of excellence.

About Charles River Development

Charles River Development provides software, hosting and data services to automate front- and middle-office investment operations for buy-side firms. On-premises software and SaaS solutions support portfolio management, compliance and risk monitoring, order and execution management, and access to global liquidity. The company has more than 300 clients in 38 countries in the institutional asset and fund management, alternative investments, wealth management, insurance, banking, pension and custody markets.