IT Support Company

Alecta (formerly SPP)

 Alecta is Swedens most popular occupational pension provider, with more than 1.5 million policyholders (about 17% of the entire Swedish population). Total assets under management (2003) are SEK 314bn (UK 22.9bn). Alecta acquired the London and Edinburgh Trust (LET), a UK property investment fund, taking total property assets worldwide to nearly UK 4bn at the time. Alecta and LET had incompatible reporting requirements and systems. Managed Networks as retained to provide one unified system that would report on the asset performance of the whole portfolio in formats appropriate both to local boards and to the overall management in Sweden.

 

The portfolio was managed from offices in London, New York, Stockholm and Amsterdam, with properties held in more than 30 countries and currencies. Some properties were part-owned joint-ventures, some were held through a number of intermediate vehicles, and some were owned in order to provide rent-controlled housing to Alecta pensioners rather than as investments. All of these elements had to be accounted for in the final system.

Solution

Managed Networks first task was to define the reporting requirement clearly, and to establish the correct mathematical basis for each reported indicator. This document was circulated throughout the Alecta property management team and became the reference document for all performance reporting.

Thereafter we built a series of increasingly powerful reporting systems, each incorporating a greater part of the whole operation either in portfolio terms or in terms of activities supported. The final version covered all aspects of information capture and reporting on more than 500 properties worldwide, with distributed updating of data and importing of transactions from local accounting and bank management systems. The system also provided outbound exports to the central accounting system and supplied the UK treasury management function. Reporting was based on flexible spreadsheet templates, allowing easy production both of formatted presentation reports and of worksheets that could be used to support work outside the system.

Technology

Based in its final version on Visual Basic 5 and Oracle 7, the system used an in-house replication engine to synchronise changes between databases in four operating locations and the central Stockholm reporting system. Output was to Excel using VBA with user-customised templates and both dynamic and stored criteria. The system maintained links to the on-line systems of banks for each operating location, as well as import from SWIFT, and supported import and export from a number of property accounting systems, including Mentor and Alectas own mainframe system.

website: www.alecta.com