Rimes Technologies has signed up one of the biggest clients of its SmartFiles service in the Asia Pacific region, in the form of Prudential Asset Management Asia, based in Sydney.

The two organisations have been in discussions for some months now, but the deal was only finalised in June. Prudential was offered a three month trial during which the implementation was completed and Rimes convinced it of the strength of the system. Rimes will supply its data collating service to the funds manager which has nearly $37 billion under management, more than half of which is in discretionary funds in Singapore. The SmartFiles application will deliver Prudential over 140 customised files for performance attribution analysis. Andy Barrow, Rimes head of Asia Pacific, said the three-month trial was crucial to winning the business, “We found that it was a significant thing to do,” he says. Rimes, which recently added the new MSCI Global Investable Market Indices to its data base, continues to find interest for SmartFiles across the region. Recently three quant-based hedge fund managers signed up, making a total of eight such managers using the service.