Invesco, based in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, is one of the largest investment managers in the United Kingdom, managing £91.59bn in assets on behalf of individual clients, fund platforms, nominees, pension funds and other corporate institutions. The company has encountered considerable growth over the past two decades both organically and through acquisitions.
One key acquisition included the £700m purchase of Perpetual plc, a leading UK fund management group with over £11bn worth of funds under management.
Invesco had decided that they would fully merge the businesses as one including all the IT platforms that supported the newly formed enlarged business. As a result of an analysis phase, it was agreed that Invesco’s data would move to Perpetual’s retail fund solution and then an upgrade to an entirely new solution would be contemplated at a later date after a period of steady-state.
We provisioned a team of resources to implement a full data migration service including project management. All production critical databases, tables, columns and data were migrated from a SQL Server-based solution to an IBM legacy solution. The data migrated amounted to moving funds under management totalling £800million. Our developers wrote all necessary database scripts and created a testing framework to accompany the solution.
XPS provided both script developers as well as resources that complemented Invesco’s own internal test team. Our developers compiled the scripts into procedures which could then be called by the test team members via a simple front-end application which we also developed.
A key requirement to the solution was that our teams had to move all of the data within a specific time window, the entire merger of the two businesses and their data had to occur over a weekend with all the data moving to support the business to be operational the following working day. We developed the solution to adopt the fastest method for exporting data via a Bulk Copy Program and then for ease of use linked this to a front-end that called the relevant scripts when requested. As part of the extraction, we created checksums of data out and data in, and table, row and byte count levels to ensure all data was migrated.
After several test migration runs carried out over-scheduled weekends, we hit the migration weekend with the ability to extract all required data (including any supplementary data) and load the data to its destination location so as all platforms worked as expected in 40 hours, this was 8 hours quicker than we had been allocated and this allowed for other project streams to benefit from additional time to complete their own tasks and requirements.
The key deliverable and advantage to our client was the ability to be up and trading on time to all their clients with no omissions or inaccuracies within the data. With data precision running to 4 decimal places and just over 20 million transactions migrated this was a well-recognised achievement.