Paris – Quark announced today that CM-CIC Asset Management (CM-CIC AM) has chosen Quark’s dynamic publishing technology to automate the production of investment reports. CM-CIC AM is the third-party asset management service provider of France's second-largest retail bank, the Crédit Mutuel-CIC group. Quark’s dynamic publishing technology, including QuarkXPress® and QuarkXPress® Server, now allows CM-CIC AM to maintain data integrity while optimizing their publishing workflow.

Every month, CM-CIC AM produces a number of two-page UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities) reports that include a variety of financial data in text, table, and graph format. Available on the bank's networks, the UCITS reports are a major source of financial information and indicate the past and future trends of the bank’s investment funds. As such, the accuracy and timeliness of the reports are of utmost importance.

A Manual Process
Gilbert Godard, Head of Project IT at Euro Information Développement (EID), describes the lengthy procedure the company underwent in the past to produce the UCITS sheets: "Previously the reports were created manually. We produced about 150 UCITS financial sheets every month by putting together vital data, such as statistics and graphs, from Excel and PowerPoint files that our publishing division entered into an Excel spreadsheet. This process had shown its limits, however, with an obvious lack of rationalization, major risks of error – related to manual copy-paste operations – and an increasingly large, but non-standardized information flow."

Three Times the Documents, Three Times Faster
To update their publishing process, the team created templates with QuarkXPress that corresponded with requirements issued by CM-CIC AM and produced a fusion engine that allowed for the transfer of data to the templates. Once the application was design and built (made up of QuarkXPress Server, the fusion engine and configurations), it was deployed within two weeks.

After 18 months of document production, CM-CIC AM can confidently say that Quark’s solution has proven to be extremely efficient. "Previously we published about 150 UCITS sheets on the 23rd of every month, which was not ideal,” said Ghislaine Brugère, Manager of the Publishing Division at CM-CIC AM. "With Quark’s solution we have been able to move the publication of our reports to the first half of each month. We will be able to shorten the production time even more once we streamline the integration of external data from a third party investment analysis firm. As soon as we can calculate these performance measurements internally, the production and distribution times will probably be less than one week."