Real Estate Investment Case Study

IKINDI, Cougar Software and a leading Global Real Estate Manager (Client) successfully accomplished the implementation of an enterprise-wide automation plan in 2014 and are currently working on international rollout, with a strategic focus on early adoption of OSCRE standards and PIE-X (Portfolio Information Exchange).

The Challenge

The Client confronted hurdles in the implementation of a global portfolio modeling application to build a scalable architecture that meets its enterprise business model requirements – fully automating their operational cycle with proper checks and balances, reducing costs over the long term, and eliminating steep operational risks.

The Client

The Client is a leading global financial services organization and is ranked among the world’s largest institutional real estate investors, with a multi-billion dollar global portfolio of investments spanning directly owned property, equity securities and private debt. It holds the distinction of being one of the largest managers of U.S. tax-exempt real estate assets. A recent acquisition has resulted in a 23% expansion of its 3-figure multi-billion dollar AUM.

The Solution

IKINDI (a FinTech Data Management & Integration solution provider and leader in asset management middle-office business process solutions), Cougar Software (a leading provider of real estate portfolio modeling, budgeting, planning and forecasting solutions), and the Client teamed up to deliver an enterprise-class portfolio modeling application solution – enhancing the application’s ability to integrate with a major global client infrastructure, and improving end-to-end process cycle automation. IKINDI provided specialized project management, senior technical liaison and oversight, and deployment of The IKINDI KTier™ platform which provides a Middle Office Operational Command & Control capability for automated data validation & data movement.  IKINDI also provided key Middle Office subject matter expertise on a transitional basis. Cougar Software developed industry-standard APIs, rolled out their portfolio modeling application in the cloud and provided commercial real estate subject matter expertise. The Client marshalled its Data Governance, Operations, Front Office Transformation & Adoption and IT teams while contributing enterprise-class and real estate subject matter expertise.

The ground-breaking industry solution crafted by IKINDI and Cougar Software utilizes the IKINDI middle tier for command & control data and platform integration to enable Cougar’s portfolio modeling enterprise-class capabilities. This marks the first time IKINDI’s middle tier has been used for real estate investments and represents an important and exciting first-to-market achievement by both providers.

Technology

At the interface level, for integration across cloud environments & across different providers, IKINDI makes use of RESTFUL Web Services, with HTTP protocols providing uniformity, universality, and security while facilitating reusability of integration.  To drive integration across business processes and to manage end-to-end operational threads, IKINDI uses KTier™, its flagship platform. KTier™ promotes data consistency and expanded consumption of data by multiple providers. Employing a flexible and component-based architecture that is solidly grounded on nimble business rules and industry best practices, KTier™ validates, enriches, and transforms data. It operates in a distributed environment and supports high levels of scalability, availability, reliability, redundancy and durability. RESTFUL Web Services and KTier™ are but a number of leading-edge technologies that comprise IKINDI’s tool set.

A core component of Cougar’s onePlace product has been the development of a comprehensive RESTful web API. The API gives third party developers full access to Cougar’s commercial real estate data model and its world leading modeling and forecasting capabilities. Informed by twenty years of data modeling for commercial real estate and a strong understanding of the RESTful approach, the API is organized in an intuitive manner that supports rapid development by experienced commercial real estate software developers.

Results

With the successful 2014 completion of the first key phases of automation, the Client is now able to run its monthly operational cycle in production with substantially more automation and reduced execution times than before.  With speedy identification of data issues requiring investigation, more accurate and timely Front Office & Management reporting is being generated with the efficiencies this brings. 2015 will see completion of International roll-out, and the early adoption of OSCRE standards as a strategic focus.