Apex has created a new chief data officer role to manage the flow and quality of data across all of its corporate, custody, depository and fund services businesses.
Renaud Oury joins Apex in Luxembourg as group chief data officer (CDO) and a member of the executive committee.
He will be responsible for developing and managing Apex’s comprehensive analytics strategy, with a priority of leveraging data and information to enhance client services.
Oury joins from Banque Internationale a Luxembourg (BIL) where he was head of wealth management for the Belgian and Dutch markets. Prior to that, he was group sales and marketing director, and a member of the group executive committee at SGG Group.
“We are thrilled to welcome Renaud to the executive committee and look forward to working with him to ensure Apex leverages technology to stay innovative, agile and forward thinking,” said Peter Hughes, founder and CEO, Apex Group.
“Data is at the core of our business and as our range of technological solutions grows across the Group, the role of CDO is increasingly necessary to help the company identify value. Renaud will focus on integrating Apex’s data flows and enhancing data quality, while exploring opportunities to leverage the wealth of data we have as an asset that both delivers insights to benefit our clients and predicts the needs of the market.”
Fund administrators are doubling efforts on their data and analytics capabilities in response to increased client demand for transparency and real-time data services.
For fund managers, data is needed to enable more effective fund distribution, accurate regulatory reporting, portfolio analytics and operational efficiency. With demands moving on from traditional fund servicing such as accounting and NAV, increasingly advanced technology is being required to keep up.
In a recent survey by eVestment, one large global fund administrator remarked that, “The traditional ‘fund administration bundle’ seems to be taking a back seat to highly tailored operating models which incorporate a mix of traditional and ‘value-add’ services – including data aggregation and normalisation, flexible reporting tools combining data sets by multiple parties and trade operations support and connectivity.”
“By focusing on translating data into knowledge we can increase the performance of the business and enhance service quality for our clients. Apex has experienced transformational growth over the past 18 months and therefore my immediate priority will be coordinating the integration of data across the different entities,” added Oury.