Automate Financial Portfolio Management using Morningstar Data Feeds - Phase 1

Project Description

We are a wealth management company that is perfoming portfilio management and asset allocation manually using Excel. We look at financial data from Mornigstar and then enter the change in prices in Excel. We would like to automate this process by creating a central data repository to bring in data feeds. This project will be executed in three phases.  The budget displayed is for Phase 1.

1. General considerations

There project will have three phases:

1. Phase 1 - create the framework for the solution and automate the creation of the customer files based on the transactions and the data downloaded from Morningstar.
2. Phase 2 - implement decision engine that will propose the transactions that should be performed, and will generate an output with the transactions.
3. Phase 3 - implement an online solution where each customer can log in and see the status of his portfolio 

2. Deliverables

The proposed solution consist of the following deliverables:

1. Database system that is storing all the data processed
2. Morningstar connection module that periodically downloads the data from Morningstar
3. Customer file - the module that displays the file of a customer, and can generate the output file for the customer after the values were updated based on the data from Morningstar
4. Import module that will import in the system the portfolio changes for each customer after transactions were processed

3. Work process

The solution we provide will support the following work process in Phase 1:

1. All the portfolio information of all the customers are imported from an Excel into the system
2. Periodically the application downloads from Morningstar the price and the rating of different funds
3. The portfolio of each customer is updated with the downloaded information
4. The user calls a report for each customer and can preview the status of the portfolio
5. From the report the portfolio information for a customer can be saved into the requested Excel format (or other format)
6. Trades are performed on different portfolios for different customers
7. These trades are imported into the system from an Excel file
8. The report with the portfolio information is called again to see the updated portfolio

The benefit of this approach is that the manual work for downloading the fund information and update the portfolio files for each customer will be completely automated. What remains manual work is just to perform the transactions for each customer.

In Phase 2, the functionality can be extended so that the system will propose transactions to be performed in order to bring the portfolios to the targeted status.

4. Technology Stack

We are leaning toward technology based on Microsoft SQL Server. We will need help in procuring Microsoft SQL Server hosting with the SSIS and SSRS modules installed.