The Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) Office of Investments manages the University’s $3.2 billion endowment fund. The Office needed to be able to determine consolidated risk exposures of the endowment to better understand the impact of different macroeconomic and market shocks.
The Risk Management team needed an application that could integrate and map data from multiple internal and external sources in a timely and repeatable manner and give accurate reports of the endowment’s factor risk exposures. The solution needed to be web-based, with an easy-to-use front end for business users, as well as a sophisticated engine to deliver the analytics necessary the university’s stakeholders.
The Office of Investments evaluated all the leading data integration platforms currently available, and compared them with their SSIS platform currently in use. It was determined that SSIS was difficult for business users to learn and use, and other platforms either did not meet the evaluation criteria or were too expensive. The team selected Centerprise for its superior usability, functionality, and affordability.
By leveraging Centerprise’s dataflow, workflow, and scheduling capabilities, Vanderbilt was able to quickly develop integration jobs to automatically retrieve and map data from internal systems, as well as external money managers, and integrate it into the endowment tracking software. The project has been so successful that Vanderbilt is now deploying Centerprise in other areas to enhance existing processes.
Authors:
- Irfan Ahmed