Clair: At State Street, across the whole organization and the relationship that you have across the broad base of touch points that you have with us, it's really fantastic. All I get is positive feedback on the relationships that you have with us, and that the way that you interact and partner with us. I'd love for State Street to get to know a little bit more about Cora.

Clair: So is it possible could you sort of tell us a little bit about your career and your way of working?

Kora: I can do that. I joined what was Investec Asset Management 15 years ago. That was five years after we outsourced basically through a lift out of our back office and middle office to State Street. So my and I joined to be a vendor, the relationship manager for the relationship with State Street. And what was immediately obvious was that it's a partnership, and you have to treat people as if they're part of the organization, rather than somebody that's doing things to you rather than with you.

So we have been through many challenges from our organization's perspective. As I said, it was Investec Asset Management when I joined, we demerged from the Investec Group and listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, as well as the London Stock Exchange in 2020.

It happened actually days before the world went into lock down for covid so that was quite a challenging time to do that but we had good partners at that point State Street remained a reliable partner, stable, our organisation weathered that storm quite well.

And now we are a proudly independent investment manager with a long term view and we are ambitious to align our targets with the long term targets of our clients.

Clair: So you touched on Project Moonshot, which is the relatively new and the new partnership that we've got moving in to CRD and the Alpha platform. I'd love your view on how that's going.

We had, both the objective to improve our data management, but we also needed to refresh our front office technology. And Charles River as part of that Alpha platform was the obvious answer for us, considering the success we've had as a business through the platform that State Street has provided over the years.

Kora: What I can say is it's a 20 year relationship with 20 years worth of, problem solving that went into what we have there. So the implementation has been more difficult than we originally thought because both in our organization side we are unplugging, order management system that's been in place for 25 years, possibly 30 years.

Kora: And we are integrating that into a middle office that's been in place for 20 years. And a lot of those things all have been largely unchanged, with tweaks around the edges for many years. And this is a wholesale re-engineering of the front to back process for both organizations. And during that process, when we started, the whole Alpha concept was also in its infancy.

And I can see over the long period that I’m involved with this that it has matured significantly over that period.

So what are you excited about going forward on the new platform, and how will you positioning yourself and your team to be able to support the new infrastructure?

Kora: The platform that we are implementing is a platform that we can leverage for our future business objectives. And the biggest challenge that most managers face is just data. There is just too much of it, and your ability and speed to wrangle data into insights is an asset managers biggest objective. And through this platform, this enables us to have more real time information at our fingertips.

The ability for an investment manager to create insights out of the vast amounts of data that is available out there in the world is very much dependent on our operational ability to make it available at the right time in the right place and to the right people. And this an definitely an opportunity for us to move quite far ahead from where we are.

How do your teams feel about the relationship?

Kora: It's a partnership. So it's not nameless, faceless, nameless people behind emails. It's we we'd like to meet as many people as we can. We like to form personal relationships with people. We see them as. This is a it's a marriage. We are in it together. And sometimes it's hard work. And sometimes, you know, the one needs to give more than the other.

Kora: But in the end it's we working towards the same goals. So the, the, the one thing that I can say about this relationship is that State Street always delivers, not always as fast as we want it to be, but in the end it is the most stable partnership that you can hope for from a just consistency of delivery perspective and the enthusiasm for staff.

Kora: It's, the service orientation of State Street, I think is the thing that differentiates it from other players in the market. It's such a strong service ethos which helps us move mountains for our clients because our clients are demanding and we all in emerging markets manager So we challenge you with new stuff all the time and the willingness to entertain all the wonderful things that we dream up is, is what we appreciate and love the most.