Fusion Case Study
Institutional Voting Information Service (IVIS)
www.ivis.co.uk/
Developed in 1993 by the Association of British Insurers (ABI), IVIS is one of the UK’s leading providers of corporate governance voting research. The service has developed from the low key, proactive, but non-confrontational approach to corporate governance adopted by the ABI. The ABI represents the insurance industry and its interests in the UK, Europe and around the world. The 440 members own approximately 20% of the FTSE All-Share Index, along with over £1.5 trillion assets.
Through its dedicated team of specialists, IVIS provides institutional shareholders with information reports prior to voting opportunities such as the Annual General Meeting.
In addition the IVIS website provides visitors with detailed information about the service as well as a repository for all reports. These can be accessed via simple or complex search methods and for non-subscribers, purchased online.
Subscribers get a wider range of services including alerts for upcoming meetings, advanced search techniques and online report delivery via PDF documents. Subscribers are able to tailor their services individually.
Research and Creation of Reports
A company report is generally made up of three elements. These are the Proxy Report, the Combined Code Report, and the Environmental, Social and Governance Report. The Proxy and Combined Code reports are given a Colour Code or 'Top' to reflect levels of concern or to raise awareness to elements of the report.
When a company gives notice of a forthcoming meeting, IVIS, who hold a least one share in all reported companies, receive the associated documentation. The company resolutions and policies are then scrutinised for adherence to corporate governance best practice, environmental and social policies.
A report will go through several phases before being released, calling on the teams knowledge, existing databases and often requiring further information from the corporate executives themselves. This requires extensive note taking across a wide variety of input.
All this has to be done to tight deadlines as the reports have little value past the meeting date.
Innovative design and development by Fusion
Fusion’s challenge was twofold:
- To produce a back-office system which enabled the gathering of disparate data, notes and comments; to manage the report creation and to tightly integrate with an interactive website.
- A website capable of servicing both subscribers and non-subscribers, offering professional design and informative content, e-commerce capabilities, powerful searching and a functionally rich environment for subscriber self-service.
Fusion’s approach was to first design a robust architecture for the new application and then to add the wide range of functionality by presenting IVIS with a series of prototypes, enabling them to see each component independently.
The architecture incorporated the User Interface, design and ergonomics, and dual database design structure. The back-office runs on an in-house SQL server, whilst the website is hosted at Fusions secure data centre and, also using a SQL server, holds the reports database and all subscriber and e-commerce data.
A key feature was the approach to resilience and disaster recovery; the back-office system contains all the report structures, associated data and administration functionality and publishes real-time to the hosted website database. Although each is updated in different ways, these two databases are in fact identical and replicate each other in real-time.
The benefit of this is in-build redundancy and the ability to run both applications (back-office and web services) from EITHER location, should the need arise.
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