Growing volume, growing complexity
The fund operations team at Natixis Investment Managers — 20 professionals across Boston, Luxembourg, London, and Paris — is responsible for the accurate reporting of 575 funds. With multiple domiciles and fund structures, the global team is constantly switching between repetitive reporting cycles and unique, high-touch projects, such as launching a new fund.
“We looked at it purely on an ROI basis: what's the potential for time savings — how many man-hours or fractional headcount — and can we demonstrate that it's worth taking the project forward.”
Evaluating AI vs Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
McKenna had initially considered Robotic Process Automation tools. “I think of RPA as being keystroke mimicking. What we were looking to automate was a much larger process…taking our time, checking things, performing some reasonability analysis.”
That’s when industry colleagues introduced McKenna to OnCorps — an AI platform designed to solve large data challenges in Financial Operations.
The Challenge: Review the Un-reviewable
The Natixis team had been manually reviewing Annual and Semi-Annual reports produced by their fund administrator. By automating these processes, Natixis could move away from the legacy process:
- Hundreds of hours spent reviewing three rounds of drafts
- Limited capacity to take on responsibilities with equal or greater risk
- No auditable register to track exceptions and examine root causes
Natixis worked with OnCorps to configure the platform to automatically ingest draft PDF reports from the fund administrator, as well as internal accounting data. It then performs reconciliation, calculation, and style checks against source data.
Time Spent on Annual Report Review, pre- and post-OnCorps Solution
Upon deployment, OnCorps automatically identified 60 potential errors in the first draft. The comprehensive analysis enabled Natixis to rapidly review each draft, saving 92% of the time previously required and fully eliminating one round of review, while generating a new, transparent audit trail.
The hunt for automation was not to be trendy. We were looking for time savings
The decision from a management standpoint was: do I want my staff to become junior coders, taking away from their professional responsibilities? Or do I want to go for a more sophisticated solution like OnCorps?
Results
92%
Reduction in time spent reviewing reports
60+
Exceptions found on first AI review
1
Complete round of reviews eliminated
