Sequantis Invest provides dedicated services to institutional investors: insurance companies, mutuals, retirement funds as well as non-profit associations and foundations. The company, a Sequantis subsidiary, specialises in asset servicing. It revalues institutional investors’ portfolios on a weekly or monthly basis. The team at Sequantis Invest process the full financial and accounting dataset, calculating all indicators needed by institutional investors to create all their reports: accounting, financial and regulatory.

Sequantis Invest’s activities are based around Insight, a proprietary software package originally developed by the company at the turn of the millennium. It has been regularly updated to take account of changes in legislation and regulations, as well as in response to specific investor needs. This software lies at the centre of Sequantis Invest’s activities. It is used to calculate portfolio positions and helps in the creation of reports, whether these be accounting, financial or regulatory. Insight offers several special features. One of the key features is the master database of securities.

The software developed by Sequantis Invest is based on a single database that is shared by all the company’s clients.

This single master database is a guarantee of security and reliability, avoiding common errors caused by aggregating unmatched data. This means, for example, that a financial instrument will always have the same value across all portfolios at any given instant. Shared information offers another considerable advantage: it enables a process of mutualisation whereby smaller players benefit from the expertise of the larger. Sequantis subscribes to the majority of leading providers and shares its data with all its clients, large and small. This means that all clients have access to comprehensive standardised data.

The teams at Sequantis Invest start by retrieving all securities transactions. This task is handled by the Sequantis portfolio controller, which sources information from three separate sources: institutional clients, agents and custodians. These operations are updated weekly or monthly according to the client’s instructions.

The next stage involves checking that the calculations and valuation of the portfolio position are correct, several controls are performed to achieve this.

Once data is checked it becomes available to clients on the Insight platform in read-only mode.

Sequantis’ software operates in SaaS mode. Clients have simple access to the platform to create their dashboards, graphs, calculate new indicators, etc., as well as formatting them to prepare various accounting, financial and regulatory reports. Our client services team is always on hand to assist, inform and guide clients. The team is contactable via a hotline that provides access to experts who are responsible for each institutional investor.

Data collected and reprocessed by Sequantis Invest can be used by finance directors and their teams to create all the dashboards needed to manage their activities.

Our Insight software is an additional bookkeeping tool for investments. It interfaces with standard bookkeeping software packages. It is sufficiently flexible to be configured to handle different charts of accounts and the specific requirements of insurance and mutual companies. It can make price calculations based on first in first out or weighted average purchase price, calculate amortisation of premium or discount (relative to redemption value), calculate provisions for lasting depreciation, even calculate the capitalisation reserve.

This means that clients are able to create comprehensive accountancy reports for use by finance departments and senior executives, as well as being able to assess taxable gain liabilities.

Calculating performance, performance attribution, volatility, portfolio sensitivity, etc. Our Insight software calculates a range of financial indicators needed to manage institutional investors’ portfolios, no matter what the class of asset.

Sequantis Invest can also create new indicators on request. Any new indicators will be shared by all the platform’s users. Using these indicators, institutional investors are able to create the dashboards, graphs, simulations, etc., needed by finance departments and senior management to define or fine-tune an investment policy, track investments, check that they align with predetermined objectives and adjust positions in the events of movements in the markets.

Sequantis Invest teams have paid special attention to regulatory reporting. Institutional investors, whether insurance companies, mutuals or retirement funds, are subject to ever tighter regulatory oversight that impacts every aspect of their investment policies, including the requirement to make frequent regulatory filings.

For insurers and mutuals subject to Solvency II, Sequantis Invest provides support in relation to the directive’s three pillars.

To start with, solvency capital requirements (SCR) are calculated using Insight software. Calculations are made by looking through(*) the Mutual Funds shares held in the investment portfolio.

(*) Mutual Funds shares are replaced by securities held by the Fund

As well as processing data and prices for instruments in a portfolio, Insight is also a simulation tool. What is the impact of introducing a new class of assets or a regulated collective investment scheme? This question, critical for adjusting asset allocations, can be handled by Insight. It is via this simulation module that Sequantis Invest assists its clients with their Pillar II obligations.

Its Insight software assists with Pillar III by providing quantitative reporting templates for insurance companies’ investments. Insight also interfaces with a great many of the market’s Solvency II tools. Insight delivers verified data about investments in the format appropriate for these tools.

Sequantis Invest also assists a large number of clients that have already been inspected by ACPR, France’s prudential control authority. This means that our teams are able to assist clients that wish to improve their performance in this respect.

Solvency II is not the only regulation that Sequantis Invest can help clients with. The software can also be used to complete national-specific templates to submit to ACPR as well as, for top-up retirement funds, reports required by oversight bodies such as AGIRC-ARRCO. Depending on specific requirements, our teams can intervene at an early stage in the process to advise investors and ensure that the reports they submit comply with the requirements of their oversight body.