Oregon Treasury Changes Tech For Better Reporting

Following the retirement of its fixed-income-portfolio manager, and the subsequent decision to outsource the supervision of that fund, Oregon State Treasury found its portfolio-management system was much larger than its needs required.

After outsourcing most of its trading, Sally Furze, controller, Oregon State Treasury, says that there wasn't much need for a large system. "We were left with only a short-term fund managed in-house. On any day there were 10 to 12 trades, max, so it seemed like overkill to maintain a full-blown investment-accounting engine to handle those few trades."

Additionally, the treasury realized that with all its trades being recorded and accounted for by its custodian, State Street, it no longer needed to maintain an investment-accounting system. Therefore, the treasury, which is responsible for $44 billion in assets, decided to shelve its Camra system from SS&C and replace it with a smaller, more cost- effective product.

To find a more appropriate product, Oregon Treasury enlisted the help of InvesTech Systems Consulting, a provider of consulting and professional services for large buy-side institutional investors. InvesTech did some research and came back to the treasury with a short list of names, including Eagle Investment Systems, Netik, and an offering from State Street. With the list in hand, Oregon Treasury issued a request for information to the vendors.

Based on advice from InvesTech, the treasury decided to go with a data-warehouse approach to its investment reporting. "We thought if we could find a way to capture our custodian's data then we could produce the reporting that our customers needed," says Furze.

Ultimately, Oregon State Treasury chose products from Eagle Investment Systems to help it capture that information and produce the reports it wanted. Those products include Eagle Pace, a Web-based data hub and portfolio-management system, Eagle Portal, which facilitates the retrieval of investment data through Web and wireless devices, and Eagle Trade Hub, which provides a link between front-office-trading systems and custodians and clearing houses.

Additionally, Furze says that Eagle was chosen because it had a good track record of working with public-plan-sponsor clients, including finishing implementations on time. "(Eagle) had done successful implementations within reasonable lengths of time (four to five months)," says Furze.

That was especially important to the treasury because its lease with SS&C is up on Dec. 31, 2002 and the organization wanted some time to run both systems in parallel mode before shutting down Camra completely.

Now, trades at Oregon State Treasury are inputted into Bloomberg Trading System and uploaded to State Street where all the accounting is done. Following that, the information is relayed back into Eagle's data warehouse where treasury employees can structure the data to get many different types of reports.

"One of the things this is going to do is make it possible for us to deliver reports online instead of printing and mailing," says Furze. "Eventually, I would like to have it set up so that our customers can access their own data online and use it for their own ad hoc reports."