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How trust companies can use Alteryx to move investment data from Connect into their core admin systems

For trustees
6 mins
Topics
Connect Monitor Data & Automation
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Resource Category 🟢-2

Playbooks

for trustees

When Enhance monitors your portfolios, the investment data associated with your clients is yours. It sits in Connect as a single, verified source covering every portfolio. The Connect API lets you bring that data into your own systems in a structured and automated way. The question is how to achieve this without manual exports, spreadsheets and re-keying.

This playbook is about one job: using Alteryx, a low-code, no-code tool many trust company operations teams already employ, to integrate Connect with your core admin systems. It walks through pulling that data from the Connect API, shaping it to your systems and loading it without manual handling, then introduces Continuum, an Alteryx specialist Implementation Partner of Enhance, as the firm that can make it all happen.

Why this matters now

Person 🟢
Client expectations

Clients expect their administered wealth to appear in your systems accurately and soon after it is verified, not weeks later after manual input.

Money Off 🟢
Margin pressure

Exporting, reformatting and re-keying investment data each quarter ties up skilled staff on work that a machine can do faster and without error.

Policy 🟢
Key-person risk

When integrations live in one person’s spreadsheet macros, they break the day that person is on leave or leaves the firm.

The data is already there and available to Enhance clients. The opportunity is to harness the value of that data automatically and deliver operational benefits to your company and clients.

01 Map

Map the gap between Connect and your core systems

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.”

— Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm

Every trust company runs on a core admin or accounting system, and Connect holds the investment data. Between the two sits a gap that staff bridge by hand. Map it honestly: which fields your admin system needs, where each lives in Connect, and every point where someone exports, reformats or re-keys. That map is the specification for everything that follows, and it usually exposes how much manual effort the current process hides.

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02 Connect

Hook Alteryx to the Connect API

“We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.”

— Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media

The Connect API is the secure, structured way one system requests data from another automatically, and Alteryx connects to it directly. Once authenticated, a workflow can call Connect on demand or on a set schedule, with no manual download. For a firm that already runs Alteryx, the barrier is low: the licences, the skills and often the server are already in place, so this is a configuration task, not a new technology project.

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03 Extract

Pull the investment data you need

“Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”

— Clive Humby, dunnhumby

With the connection live, Alteryx pulls exactly what your admin system needs: transactions, holdings, valuations, portfolio reference data, action points and report metadata. It arrives in Connect’s universal, double-entry, transaction-level standard, already verified against the counterparty that holds the assets. Nothing to reconcile, nothing to reformat at source.

04 Transform

Shape it to fit your systems

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”

— Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard

This step turns generic data into something your systems can consume. Inside Alteryx, the workflow blends, cleanses and maps Connect’s fields to your admin system’s schema: account codes, chart of accounts, transaction types, currency and FX. Done once in a visual workflow, the mapping is documented, repeatable and auditable, not buried in a spreadsheet only its author understands. This is where most home-grown integrations fall down.

05 Automate

Load it, schedule it, scale it

“Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do.”

— Jeff Bezos, Amazon

The final step writes the transformed data into your admin system and puts the workflow on a schedule. When verified data is available in Connect, the workflow runs on its own: extract, transform, load. No one touches a file. The data lands in your admin system soon after it is ready in Connect, instead of days or weeks later after manual exports and re-keying.

$50bn+

Assets under reporting

$5bn+

Assets under advice

7,000+

Connect accounts

800+

Investment managers

300+

Investment feeds

25,000+

Investment securities

What is an API?

An API (application programming interface) is the secure, structured pipe that lets two systems exchange data automatically. APIs do the plumbing. AI does the thinking. The Connect API is how trustees bring Connect data into their admin systems, accounting platforms and document management tools, without re-keying a single line. Alteryx is one of the most common tools used to consume it.

Quantifying the operational savings

One structured data request from the Connect API can save up to 40 minutes of manual work per portfolio, per quarter. For a firm monitoring 500 portfolios at a blended staff cost of £1 per minute, that is £80,000 in annual savings, before accounting for reduced error rates, faster client response times and staff freed for higher-value work.

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Alteryx: an integration mechanism you control

The integration sits in a tool you own and run. It does not depend on your trust admin system vendor building, hosting or maintaining a Connect connector, or on that vendor’s release cycle. The workflow calls the Connect API directly, so the firm controls when it runs. That makes Alteryx a durable point of integration: if you change admin system, the Alteryx layer is adjusted rather than rebuilt, and the logic stays inside the firm, documented on the canvas.

Beyond the ledger: visualisation, monitoring and reporting

Once Enhance data flows into Alteryx, it can feed more than your accounting ledger. The same verified source, pulled once or repeatedly, can power data visualisations and dashboards, transaction monitoring and regulatory reporting. The admin system integration is usually the first use case. It is rarely the last.

What Connect data can do for you

These are the data types an Alteryx workflow can pull from the Connect API and load into your systems.
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Connect gives trustees a shortcut: the data, the integrations and the API are already in production at leading trust companies. The work is to plug them in. Connect is provided at no additional cost as part of the Enhance Monitor service, delivered by Enhance Investment Reporting Limited (EIRL).
 
 
Continuum-logo 

Who builds it: Continuum

Most trust companies do not need to build this in-house from scratch. Continuum is a Jersey data consultancy specialising in Alteryx and low-code automation, working with trust companies across the Channel Islands, the UK and Europe. As an Implementation Partner of Enhance, it understands both the Connect data model and the trustee operating context.

Continuum was founded in 2014 by Dan Hare. It was named Alteryx Partner of the Year 2020 for the UK and Northern Europe, supports more than 90 clients and over 1,000 Alteryx users, and specialises in financial services. Its trust company experience includes data work for firms such as JTC.

Continuum has already built Alteryx read adapters for Quantios products and Connect, and can build standard or custom adapters with any admin system for Alteryx licence holders.

A firm running Quantios can start from a proven adapter rather than from scratch, which shortens the build and lowers the implementation costs and risk.

“Trust companies are sitting on clean, verified investment data in Connect and still re-keying it into their admin systems by hand. With Alteryx, we connect to the Connect API once, map the data to the client’s system, and the quarterly job that used to take days runs on its own. Our Quantios Core adapter means most firms can start from something proven rather than a blank canvas.”

Dan Hare, Founder and Director, Continuum

The bottom line

If Enhance monitors your portfolios, the investment data is yours — held in Connect with an open API at your fingertips. Alteryx is a no-code way to move that data into the systems your teams use every day, and Continuum is our specialist partner which has a proven track record in delivering integrations for trust companies using Alteryx and other leading tools. Using Alteryx keeps the power and scope of integrations in your hands, removing reliance on third-party software vendors providing hosted, standardised interoperability.

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