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Quartal Financial Solutions: Technological Excellence for Fee & Commission Management

The traditional ‘Revenue and Expense Management Market’ definitely claims to provide efficient output but fails to mark up to the expectations. Today, there is a competitive space where multiple, specialized suppliers offer similar, predominantly buy-side focused, and software based solutions. Traditional in-house software or Excel-based solutions come along with software problems such as poor visibility of processes, late report submission, time consuming processes, inaccuracy in data, lack of policies and incompatibility with changing processes, etc.
Conquering the problems caused by traditional revenue and expense management solutions, Quartal Financial Solutions (Quartal) is seeking to offer a disruptive approach to solve the revenue and expense management challenges of the established segment of the financial markets. Existing revenue and expense management solutions tend to focus on the calculation of fees and costs emanating from a single point-point interaction within the buy and sell side supply chain, (e.g. trade desk to exchange, asset manager to investor, fund manager to distributor, etc.). Quartal’s vision is based on a Service on Demand S-T-P model that can handle the revenue and expenses generated from any supply chain interaction from a single cloud-based Utility- Harnessing this with a partner ecosystem, it can also offer value-added services around business analytics (e.g. sales, fund distribution, client profitability), fee or expense reconciliation (e.g. exchange fees, distribution expense, etc.), smart contract audit (e.g. digitization of trade agreements, IMAs, distribution agreements, service level agreements, etc.), operational managed services (e.g. outsourcing of fee or expense calculation processes) and data services (e.g. collection, aggregation, scrubbing or enrichment, etc.).

Regulations and profitability pressure cause financial organizations to revisit historic fee structures, operating models and distribution supply chains hence the traditional approach to revenue and expense management is no longer fit for the purpose.

The wave of technological advancement is forcing business models to reconstruct themselves completely, rather than just enabling IT to support existing business models. This is creating a vacuum for the right solution. Quartal’s offering is based upon the ability to fill this newly created void with a disruptive proposition based on a solid foundation that continues to enable the prevalent change and brings value to the customers that established solutions and competitors cannot. Quartal has marked its uniqueness and established itself as the leading European supplier and is now moving ahead to become the leading global solution provider for revenue and expense management.

CEO of Quartal Financial Solutions

Thierry Zuppinger, CEO of Quartal Financial Solutions, has studied Management at HEC and University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Thierry joined Quartal 10 years ago, when the company was a small IT consulting company, and didn’t yet have a standard product or solution to a particular problem. Thierry has a major contribution in the establishment of Quartal as a leading revenue and expense management solution provider with a standard product offering to the financial services industry that nowadays serves industry leading clients all around the globe. As a CEO, Thierry together with Quartal’s executive management team is responsible for all major decisions around Quartal’s business including the release of new products, closing deals and the company’s future strategy, etc.

Products

Quartal offers the most comprehensive and innovative solutions available in the market. It combines both, commission and fee management on one single platform, from calculations and payments to invoicing, controlling, allocations, modeling, forecasting and reporting. As such, they currently offer two leading products based on a single technology stack with one shared core— Quartal FEE MANAGER and Quartal COMMISSION. The Product is installed in multiple market segments covering asset management, wealth management and securities services. It has the ability to cover all aspects of the processing requirements for both the buy side and sell side operations with standard configurations available for each of the addressable industry sectors (e.g. asset management fee billing, third-party commission management, transaction fees, custody fees, servicing fees / expenses etc.) and constitutes a componentized product that is scalable across small to large enterprises offering comprehensive value-added functionality and reporting along with a full audit trail and comprehensive workflow support.

Quartal COMMISSION is a multi-asset class commission and distribution fee management solution that increases transparency and accuracy in commission processing while reducing associated costs and risks. Being a flexible and innovative solution, it automates the calculation, allocation and reconciliation of distribution commissions and sales costs.

The system offers a calculation and processing engine specifically designed and configured for all aspects of commission and retrocession management, allowing for rapid, reliable and transparent data processing, calculations and real-time reporting. Quartal COMMISSION benefits from great modularity enabling clients to have a solution tailored to their specific needs.

Quartal FEE MANAGER is a multi-asset class fee and revenue management solution that increases transparency and accuracy in fee processing while reducing associated costs, risks and revenue leakage. It is a market-leading one-stop solution that automates the entire process from calculation to invoicing and all the way to reporting.

It offers a flexible and innovative solution for fee, revenue and expense management with a calculation and processing engine specifically designed for all aspects of billing/revenue management. This allows for rapid, reliable and transparent data processing and calculations along with a comprehensive suite of pre-defined reports presenting actionable data through dashboards, tables and charts.

Solutions

Quartal Financial Solutions  provide solutions for Asset Management which includes Intuitional Billing and Distribution Commission Management; Wealth Management which includes Third-Party Distribution, External Asset Management and Client Fee Charging; Security  Services which includes Fund Administrators, Transfer Agents, Custody, Clearing and Fund Platforms; Capital Market which includes Trade Fee Management and Execution & Clearing Commission Management; and Insurance which includes Distribution Commission Management.

Key Characteristics

Automated calculation of payable/receivable commissions, allocations and reconciliation on payments and holdings, contract management and workflow, sales controlling and scenario modeling VAT/tax management, flexible user interface and ad-hoc reporting, BI capabilities through dashboards and KPI controls based on leading technology, compliance with current regulations and provide a platform for future regulation compliance in relevant markets, customizable, modular offering provides flexibility to meet client requirements, global implementation capability based on a strong team of industry and product experts as well as local implementation partners for the market, are few of the key characteristics of Quartal’s Products and Solutions.

Benefits for the Clients

QFS’s revenue and expense management products offer the following measurable and well documented benefits to its clients:

  • Reduction of costs and operational risk
  • End to end process auditability
  • Improved operational efficiency through the facilitation of an exception-based operating model
  • Reduced reliance on key workers through the embedding of knowledge within the solution
  • Regulatory compliance (e.g. MiFID II)
  • Avoidance of revenue leakage
  • Increased process and reporting transparency
  • Comprehensive information at the most granular level possible
  • Improved cash flow views and projections
  • Faster client onboarding
  • More flexible and more profitable SLAs
  • Straight through Processing
  • Business Oversight
  • Better availability and insight of customer data, allowing the introduction of new value-added services
  • Analytics for client profitability, distribution, fund, distributor performance, fund flows, asset classes, etc.
  • Possibilities for cost effective functional lift outs (white labeling) delivering greater value and increased profitability
  • Replacement of consolidation of numerous disparate legacy systems

Bird’s Eye View on the Future

Quartal have been in the revenue and expense management space for a long time and therefore comprehensively understands the market and have established a blue-chip customer base that uses their fee and commission solutions to meet their current point-to-point needs. Having recently extended their management team with some highly experienced members with proven experience of transforming and growing Fintech businesses, they have re-engineered their operating model, developed the vision and the delivery roadmap, initiated market testing and are now set to implement that vision via a clear, well-defined but aggressive and exciting growth plan. During the course of the last two years, they have won a significant amount of new business and have recently entered the US market by adding one of the world’s largest banks to their client portfolio.