The SAAAME economies are growing faster, creating new opportunities. Ghana's GDP growth is projected at 6.8% in 2020. Petra Trust is Ghana's largest corporate trustee company, providing fund administration and pension schemes. Petra Trust needed a flexible solution for real-time valuation and reporting to keep up with business growth. After testing Binfolio's cloud-based trial version, Petra Trust implemented Binfolio due to its customization abilities, ease of use, and support from Binfolio during and after deployment. Binfolio helped Petra Trust automate tasks, reduce workload, and double assets under management within a year.

1. The SAAAME (South America, Asia, Africa, and Middle East) economies are growing faster and
creating new opportunities, with more domestic investors. With countries in numerous levels of
development, this is a market where economic, financial and social changes have been paving
the way to a new reality. Ghana's projected GDP growth for 2020 is 6.8pct, according to the
World Bank.
The three main categories of private equity funds currently operating in Ghana are mostly from
regional and pan-African funds. In Ghana, small and medium companies represent a large part of
businesses, with more than half of the workforce. The Pensions Act of 2008 established a
three-tier pension scheme with mandatory and voluntary contributions and a few Pension Service
Providers are approved to operate under this scheme. Petra Trust is one of these providers.
Investment and Pension Funds in Ghana
Petra Trust is a corporate trustee company that works
with innovation and customer satisfaction as the main
pillars. The company combines state of the art
technology with thorough administrative
processes to ensure that they provide the
best fund administration and independent
trustee services, as well as mandatory and
voluntary pension schemes with remarkable
returns and innovative value-added services.
The Client: Innovation and Customer Satisfaction
CASE STUDY
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2. Synchronisation, Flexibility and Real-time Valuation
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Petra Trust is the biggest corporate trustee in Ghana. The company needed a flexible solution to
keep up with business growth. Rapid real-time valuation and features to meet the reporting
obligations to clients and the regulator were some of the characteristics the company was looking
for. There was also the need to distinguish trustee services by increasing the frequency of
valuations for all schemes under management.
Synchronisation, flexibility and real-time valuation were the critical factors by which Petra Trust
was choosing new software.
The turning point was while using a cloud-based trial version of Binfolio®
. Petra’s team had one
free month of Binfolio®
to try. The trial version had a database, with a standard scenario and no
limitations. The company could also create their own portfolios on the demo and load their own
database to test how the software reacted to their day-to-day operations. With the possibility to
use the software in its full capability and to test with real data was crucial for the company.
Binfolio®
can be customised to deal with scenarios, such as adjustments on income or corporate
events integration. It also allows the users to create rules and limits so the system immediately flags
any breaches after running the valuation and compliance procedure. Binfolio®
allowed Petra Trust
to prepare customised reports to meet their monthly and quarterly deliverables to the regulator.
Now, these reports are automatically generated.
With an implementation plan of 6 months, the Binfolio®
team proved to provide proper support
during and after the deploy, with 2 people fully dedicated to this client and 1 person to help on
go-live support.

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A Tailored Approach to the Market
Ghana’s investment market has some particularities to which Binfolio®
had to respond, like, for
example, Actual/364: the day count convention. The previous software didn’t respond to this need
and the adjustment was done manually. This was another key-factor to choose Binfolio®
- the
software parameters were adapted to this convention to enable an automatisation of interest
rate calculation.
It took 2 days for the Binfolio®
team to adapt the software to Ghanaian market particularities and
Petra Trust’s team really appreciated this tailored approach to the Ghanaian market.
Quick to Learn, Easy to Use
From the first moment, it was visible that the software change was going to facilitate the portfolio
team day-to-day activities. The users proved the software is intuitive and tasks are easy and quick
to perform, providing the team with great user experience. On-site training sessions were given to
the users during a week, complemented by one additional week of remote training to mitigate
questions that might not have raised during the first contact with the software.
Binfolio®
made it possible:
In 1 year, with half of the team, the client was
able to:
| Decrease 2/3 the time needed to perform
day-to-day tasks;
| Have more 50% transactions per month;
| Double the AUM;
| Reduce the workload, allowing
portfolio managers to focus on
portfolio analysis and management.

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What Our Clients Say
“Petra Trust’s experience so far with Binfolio as a valuation software has been
an extremely positive one. The ultimate advantage with Binfolio®
is that we
have more time to focus on pure portfolio management decisions, to generate
independent research across asset classes as we strive to generate
competitive returns.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning the commitment and dedication of the
Novabase team who have assisted us diligently with their support throughout
the migration process and afterward. We have been impressed with their
prompt and exemplary responsiveness to all our queries and have adequately
equipped us with the skillset to autonomously use the cloud-hosted
application from our end. They have also been very accommodating in
developing new reports and other requests to facilitate our work.”
Chris Hammond - Deputy Managing Director
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