“To continue our lead in the technology space in the unit trust industry, we constantly look for innovative ideas that will give us the quantum leap.” – CEO Boon Choy Wong

Typically, the IT department is the main protagonist driving the take-up of technology within an organization. Not so with MAAKL MUTUAL Berhad, winner of this year’s Windows in Financial Services Developer Award – given to innovative solutions developed on the Microsoft platform – for its Home Office application. Rather, the Home Office project has been championed from the start by chief executive Boon Choy Wong.

“He said we should show him all the latest, the coolest Microsoft solutions, in the front-end parts, in the mobile solutions, the Web 2.0, and he was very excited,” says Aaron Tan Dani, senior architecture advisor with Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team in Malaysia. “He loved the technology, and said he wanted to provide the best software solutions both for his customers and his business. So it’s not like other companies, where it is limited to IT. This is the chief executive driving the technology.”

Incorporated in October 2000, MAAKL MUTUAL (formerly known as MAA Mutual) is 70 percent owned by MAA Holdings Berhad, the largest insurance group in Malaysia and a leading insurance and financial services provider in the wider region. Another 20 percent of MAAKL MUTUAL is held by Khyra Liberty Sdn Bhd, with the remaining 10 percent in the hands of individuals.

Now a leading player in Malaysia’s unit trust industry, MAAKL MUTUAL manages a broad selection of both conventional and Shariah-compliant funds that cover equity, bond, and money market asset classes. A market innovator, it was the first company in Malaysia to launch a foreign unit trust fund, the MAAKL Pacific Fund, an equity growth fund that offers unit holders exposure to growth economies across the region, including China, Indonesia, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. The firm’s first real estate investment trust (REIT) fund was launched last June.

Jimmy Yeoh, CEO of MAAGNET Systems, says MHO version 3.0 now includes a time-weighted rate of return capability that measures the compound growth rate of a portfolio by eliminating distortions resulting from the inflows of new money. As a result, it provides a clearer comparison point for the actual returns a particular fund is achieving over time.

As well as aggressively extending its product range, the company also has been enjoying a period of rapid business expansion, with assets under management growing from less than RM300 million (US$93 million) in May 2004 to more than RM1.4 billion (US$435 million) today. It aims to hit RM2 billion (US$621 million) by the end of the year.

As for the strategy for reaching its growth targets going forward, MAAKL MUTUAL is relying on an advisor-centric business model. To this end, the firm has discontinued all distribution arrangements with bank-backed Institutional Unit Trust Agents. Instead, all unit trust products will be distributed solely by its professional advisors. It aims to create a force of 500 such professionals, with each managing at least RM20 million (US$6.2 million) worth of funds for 200 clients within the next five to 10 years.

“MAAKL’s vision is to be the most trusted unit trust company in Malaysia by providing quality products and services through a team of professional unit trust advisors,” notes chief executive Wong. “To achieve our vision, one of the key strategies we adopted was to ensure that all our unit trust advisors are equipped with IT tools to enable them to carry out their job. Hence the birth of MAAKL Home Office, a suite of business application tools to help our unit trust advisors build their business professionally.”

Originally launched in 2005, MAAKL Home Office (MHO) is primarily a pre- and post-sales software solution used by the unit trust advisors, as well as by clients. Version 2.0 – which offered a comprehensive suite of knowledge-based tools – was rolled out in April 2007.

Among its components is MAAKL Planners, which helps advisors guide their clients on the best way to allocate their assets in line with their specific investment objectives such as planning for retirement, their children’s education, and accumulating wealth. There is also a Client Account Management System (CAMS), a mobile office capability with features that include an asset rebalancing tool and unit trust investment reports, enabling advisors to manage and track their clients’ investments anytime, anywhere.

In addition, version 2.0 offered What-If Analysis, a fund price/index history charting tool, and fund/index comparisons so advisors can track the performance of target funds or indices against various benchmarks.

Among MAAKL Home Office’s components is MAAKL Planners, which helps advisors guide their clients on the best way to allocate their assets in line with their specific investment objectives.

Over the last three years therefore, MHO has become an indispensable toolset for the firm’s advisors. Nevertheless, “To continue our lead in the technology space in the unit trust industry, we constantly look for innovative ideas that will give us the quantum leap,” says Wong. And that has led to the development of MHO version 3.0, which “will be far superior to our existing version,” he adds.

The MHO system leverages a range of Microsoft technologies, including aspects of the software firm’s yet-to-be released 2008 technology suite. The main components then are Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server (VSTS 2008/TFS), .NET 3.x, Windows Mobile 6 and Vista. According to Dani, people in the financial services industry typically want to wait a year or two upon the release of new platforms before implementing them, to ensure all the bugs are fixed before they use it. “But they [MAAKL MUTUAL] have confidence in the Microsoft products,” he says.

The transformative aspect for MAAKL though is the switch to a Software + Services (S+S) architecture. There are many flavors of S+S set up from which an organization can choose. But, broadly speaking, rather than depending on an array of bought and/or built in-house hosted software, as is the case in a traditional enterprise technology structure, the S+S model refers to a hybrid environment that combines the local in-house software with “cloud” services, i.e., services delivered over the Internet.

In this way, S+S seeks to fuse the architectural strengths of enterprise solutions, the Internet, desktop applications, and mobile devices. As such, it aims to combine the security, stability, and high standards of in-house software with the speed and innovation of Internet-developed applications, the functional richness of desktops and the reach of mobile devices in a complementary whole. In other words, a “best of all worlds” approach that gives more flexibility, greater choice, and enhanced capabilities.

In MAAKL MUTUAL’s case, the architecture model it has adopted encompasses software for the front end, for instance mobile devices, for Windows applications, for the Web and so on, says Dani. The services part then uses a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model, which provides the architectural backbone that enables the local software to be combined with Internet-based or distributed software. “So it’s not only in the front end, which is very intuitive in terms of the rich Internet user experience, but the back end itself is very agile, as everything is using SOA,” Dani notes. “So with the Software + Services architecture they can introduce new products in a shorter time, rather than have to wait two or three months to modify the back end, the middleware, et cetera.”

With the Software + Services architecture, MAAKL is able to introduce new products in a much shorter time, says senior architecture advisor Aaron Tan Dani.

For his part, MAAKL MUTUAL’s Wong highlights the major advantages that the new iteration of the MHO platform will bring to the firm’s business: “Firstly, deployment of MHO will be so much easier compared with the current version, where installation [and any subsequent enhancement] requires a CD and updates require a lot of on-site support. This will certainly bring about a significant improvement in the productivity of our IT personnel. In addition, our unit trust advisors will find it much more convenient to update our MHO remotely.

“Secondly, unlike the current version where the applications are written in different languages, the new version will all be written in one language to enable information to be populated easily from one application to another. This feature will enhance the user-friendliness of our MHO and improve the efficiencies of our unit trust advisors.”

Similarly, Jimmy Yeoh, CEO of MAAGNET Systems, the IT arm of MAA Group that develops and delivers the system for MAAKL, notes that by building v3 solely with Microsoft technology, rather than the variety used in the previous version, it will make the IT support easier. “And in terms of human resources – the developers and resources sharing – it’s very scale economical,” he adds.

As for business functionality, the new system version also is much richer than the old one, according to Yeoh. One example is that v3 now includes a time-weighted rate of return capability, something the previous version did not, and which not many other systems are able to do, he says. This measures the compound growth rate of a portfolio by eliminating distortions resulting from the inflows of new money. As a result, it provides a clearer comparison point for the actual returns a particular fund is achieving over time.

And because time-to-market for implementing new functionality will be quicker with the updated technology, the advisors will be able to do more analysis, and communicate information to their clients faster, says Yeoh. Such improvements should then assist their revenue generating efforts, he argues.

Meanwhile, the third advantage Wong points to is that the new MHO will be deployed in mobile and Web platforms to increase the channels of accessibility for the firm’s advisors. For the users then, access to the MHO system can be via multi-channels, whether from their desktop, notebook or a PDA, explains Yeoh. In the case of PDA access, the system also incorporates some smart technology that enables it to recognize that such a device is being used and thus reduce the screen size to fit that of a PDA to make it easier to see, he notes.

In addition, an offline version of the system is available. “The online and offline versions look and feel the same, which is very convenient for our advisors, to have information anytime and anywhere they want,” says Yeoh.

MAAKL CEO Boon Choy Wong (middle) and Jimmy Yeoh, CEO of MAAGNET Systems, accept the Windows in Financial Services Developer Award from Editor Renee Wijnen Caruthers at Microsoft’s Sixth Annual Financial Services Developer Conference in New York on March 13.

“These are just some of the advantages of the new MHO,” concludes Wong. “Overall, it will put us ahead of our competitors in the unit trust industry and will certainly make our unit trust advisors look more professional when dealing with their clients.”

As for the future, there will be further enhancements made to the system. Microsoft’s 2008 platform suite has a plethora of new components that MAAKL has not yet deployed. “As we move along we will incorporate other technologies that are developed by Microsoft to make the system even better, more agile, so we can extend the services out to other users,” says Yeoh.

He points out that this is just one piece in a wider technology overhaul being carried out by MAAGNET Systems for MAA Holdings, the parent company of MAAKL MUTUAL. The goal is to move the entire organization over to a S+S framework. But to do so, it had to choose which project to embark on first in order to make it a manageable transition, Yoeh explains. The next project, therefore, which will be for MAA Assurance, the insurance subsidiary of MAA Holdings, “is on a much bigger scale, and will more or less follow the same architecture of this [the MAAKL MUTUAL] project,” he says.

The next phase of the roll out then will expand the technology capabilities to many of the organization’s third-party service providers, for example its loss adjusters, workshops such as the car repairers, and its external lawyers, says Yeoh. “So hopefully we will achieve workforce efficiency by extending the components out to the service providers,” he says. That project is at the scoping and system requirement gathering stage at present, with the first stage due to be launched in July.

www.maaklmutual.com.my/