www.i-performance-analvsis.com or i-P-A or i-p-a.com is designed as the internet portal that provides information and tools for the investment analysts community along with our customers and affiliates within asset management
i-P-A has been built by seasoned investment performance measurement and portfolio risk practitioners with the aim to help further the investment analysis profession and also to help those using our outputs or services. This area of asset management is linked to so many others that i-P-A believe we can add value, colour and life
meta-tags and key words
performance analyst,client reporting manager,risk analyst,head of performance, head of risk,recruitment,performance,investment performance,sharpe ratio,information ratio,investment risk,GIPS,performance analysis,sharpe,ipa,i-p-a,i-performance-analysis,analytics,iperformanceanalysis,TWR,MWR,IIR,BAI,performance measurement,beta,alpha,tracking error,standard deviation,GIPS,CFA institute,CIPM,money weighted returns, time weighted returns,attribution,performance theory,attribution theory,global investment performance standards,portfolio analytics software,attribution analysis,performance and attribution,performance measurement,performance measurement software,aimr,aimr pps,aimr-pps,analytic solutions,anthony howland,carl bacon,colin morrison,david spaulding,spaulding,journal of performance,asset management software,asset management industry,attribution,attribution reporting,attribution tools,client verifiers,data analysis,data hub,data migration,data reconciliation,financial software,fund management software,geometric attribution,industry standards compliance,performance software,performance tool,personal portfolio,portfolios,portfolio analysis,portfolio analytics,portfolio management,pps composites,price performance management systems,aimr gips-pps,performance presentation standards,risk management,tracking error,transaction based analysis
i-P-A has been built by seasoned investment performance measurement and portfolio risk practitioners with the aim to help further the investment analysis profession and also to help those using our outputs or services. This area of asset management is linked to so many others that i-P-A believe we can add value, colour and life
meta-tags and key words
performance analyst,client reporting manager,risk analyst,head of performance, head of risk,recruitment,performance,investment performance,sharpe ratio,information ratio,investment risk,GIPS,performance analysis,sharpe,ipa,i-p-a,i-performance-analysis,analytics,iperformanceanalysis,TWR,MWR,IIR,BAI,performance measurement,beta,alpha,tracking error,standard deviation,GIPS,CFA institute,CIPM,money weighted returns, time weighted returns,attribution,performance theory,attribution theory,global investment performance standards,portfolio analytics software,attribution analysis,performance and attribution,performance measurement,performance measurement software,aimr,aimr pps,aimr-pps,analytic solutions,anthony howland,carl bacon,colin morrison,david spaulding,spaulding,journal of performance,asset management software,asset management industry,attribution,attribution reporting,attribution tools,client verifiers,data analysis,data hub,data migration,data reconciliation,financial software,fund management software,geometric attribution,industry standards compliance,performance software,performance tool,personal portfolio,portfolios,portfolio analysis,portfolio analytics,portfolio management,pps composites,price performance management systems,aimr gips-pps,performance presentation standards,risk management,tracking error,transaction based analysis
i-P-A News Volume 4. Issue 1:
Some of the latest market news from around the globe
Some of the latest market news from around the globe
SS&C Technologies, Inc, a global provider of financial services software and software-enabled services, announced it has acquired TheNextRound, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions for the private equity and alternative investment communities.
The acquisition extends and complements SS&C's private equity software and services offering for the alternative investment management market. With more than 225 clients in 25 countries and 45 skilled professionals, TheNextRound (TNR) is a privately-held company and is a recognized leader in software for the private equity, family office, real estate partnership and alternative management space. TNR's flagship product, TNR Solution™, is an enterprise solution that supports the full breadth of front to back office capabilities, including partnership accounting, investor relations, CRM, fundraising, deal, fund and portfolio management, GL and reporting for fund managers, investors, and fund investors.
"TheNextRound is an excellent addition to the SS&C portfolio," said Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SS&C Technologies, Inc. "We are now well positioned to offer a comprehensive end-to-end private equity and alternative investment management solution."
"We are very pleased to be joining forces with SS&C," said Vipul Minocha, President, TheNextRound,Inc. "SS&C has a solid understanding of the TNR offering and the alternative investment management marketplace. SS&C's global presence and financial strength in the alternative investment segment will enhance TNR's position as a strong leader and allow us to retain our technology edge and provide better support for our clients."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
RiskMetrics Group, a leading provider of risk management and corporate governance services to the global financial community, announced it has added a powerful new set of integrated investment performance measurement tools, RiskMetrics’ PerformanceManager™, to its suite of risk applications.
With these new tools, RiskMetrics is combining performance and attribution into one seamless framework, enabling investors to align forward-looking risk with traditional performance measures. The integration of the tools offers investors easy-to-use applications, combining best-in-class analytics and reporting.
Specifically, PerformanceManager can generate buy and hold and transactions-based performance statistics, delivered daily with security-level granularity. Data tagging facilitates custom asset groupings, hierarchies and reporting. All analysis is multi-currency and preferences can be configured for different groups of portfolios. The attribution analysis portion of the tools supports multi-level views across a range of methodologies reflecting topdown, bottom-up or hybrid investment processes.
“Our investor clients have been asking for a risk and performance service that exists in one framework, leveraging similarities in data, modeling, categorisation and attribution,” said Mick Brant, Head of RiskMetrics Group’s Performance and Attribution Business. “Now, investors have the ability to view the performance and risk attributes of the investment process. This will provide them with much greater insight in to current strategies such as long-short equity among others.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
StatPro Group plc, a leading provider of portfolio analytics, market data and asset pricing solutions for the global asset management industry, announced that Bank of Montreal has signed a landmark deal with the company to use several of its portfolio management solutions.
“Bank of Montreal has subscribed to a combination of our analytics services on our new SaaS platform together with our Index Services and they join our growing band of SaaS customers in Northern America,” said Mark Bramley, CEO, North America at StatPro. “We expect many more to follow.”
The solutions will be delivered as a suite of hosted services. They include StatPro Performance and Attribution (which allows the user to drill down into performance and attribution effects from portfolio through to security level), StatPro Index Services (providing key financial indices to investment managers through a standardised platform) and StatPro’s interactive reporting tool on the SaaS platform.
“We are constantly investing to improve and enhance our data and analytics offerings. The fact that these are now available via our SaaS platform makes it very attractive to a wider audience of global customers, especially in the current market as it reduces the total cost of implementation and ownership,” concluded Bramley.
The four-year deal extends the original 2002 non-hosted contract. The new system has already gone live with Bank of Montreal.
Chris McHaney, Manager of Investments at Bank of Montreal Asset Management said: “The deal involved continuing the service we receive from StatPro, while at the same time adding the ability to automate more of our processes internally, and in turn getting the most out of the system.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Advent Software, Inc. a leading provider of software and services for the global investment management industry, announced that it has entered into agreements with Morningstar, Inc. and Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) to deliver investment classification information to its Advent Outsourcing Services clients for enhanced reporting. Advent Outsourcing Services offers Advent’s award-winning suite of products in a fully outsourced environment.
Morningstar is a leading provider of independent investment research that provides data on more than 325,000 investment offerings, along with real-time global market data on more than 4 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. GICS provides a global standard for categorizing companies into industry sectors, enabling seamless comparisons across indices by industry, by region, and globally. Through the agreements, Advent Outsourcing Services clients now have access to mutual fund style and category classification information from Morningstar and GICS as part of their standard service.
In addition, Advent now offers new flexible position and performance reporting options designed to both leverage this data and give the user control over multiple reporting elements tailoring views into allocation and exposure. While these industry-recognized standards are offered to outsourcing clients, additional options are available to firms with unique classification requirements.
“Advent’s adoption of both GICS and Morningstar classification standards for outsourcing customers is an important addition to our management and client reporting capabilities,” said Charlie Atwill, managing member of Atwill Financial Consulting Group, LLC. “It provides us with a great deal of flexibility, saves us time - and most importantly - gives us, and our clients, a more accurate picture of the composition of the portfolios we manage. This is a system we can live and grow with for the long haul.”
“Our relationships with Morningstar and GICS help us deliver industry-leading best practices to Advent’s 400-plus outsourcing clients and adds further value to our outsourced offering,” said Michael Lobosco, Director of Advent Outsourcing ServicesSM. “These arrangements demonstrate our commitment to investing in Advent Outsourcing ServicesSM and to the support of our clients’ success through best-of-breed market intelligence and access to timely, accurate and robust data.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Misysplc, the global application software and services company, announced the release of version 5.4 of its leading treasury and capital markets solution, Misys Summit FT. The release responds to market volatility combined with the need of customers to monitor and manage risk tightly with the introduction of two new solutions for Summit customers.
The new Market Risk Limits Module for Summit FT builds on the current, extensive coverage of limits. It provides banks whose primary dealing system is Summit with a single solution approach. Alternatively, banks that allocate credit and market risk limits across multiple trading systems can now benefit from Misys' enterprise-wide monitoring and control platform, Misys Eagleye, with the introduction of an out-of-the-box interface from Summit FT. Lastly, banks may combine Eagleye and Summit Market Risk Limits where market risk limits are allocated by business unit and credit limits are allocated and monitored across the enterprise.
The Summit FT Market Risk Limits module has already been selected by seven Misys customers. The solution is designed to manage risk limits enabling real-time monitoring, control and action against limit breaches in a wide selection of Summit applications. It monitors a multitude of numbers including positions, risk indicators and profit and loss ensuring that trading activity is scrutinised and controlled as it happens. Limits and breaches are displayed in the blotters of Summit on a real-time basis along with pop-ups alerting to critical issues.
The out-of-the-box Misys Summit FT interface to Misys Eagleye has already been selected by three customers. It provides banks with multiple capital markets applications with an extensible solution that provides a wider view of activity across all trading platforms. Misys Eagleye provides a control layer above a bank's many systems monitoring exceptions as well as distributing this information via alerts and dashboards around the bank.
Larry Mitchell, VP Solutions Management, Treasury & Capital Markets, Misys, comments: "We strongly believe financial institutions need to have complete transparency of their business risks through instant notification of exceptions to business defined rules, so that appropriate decisions can be made in a timely manner. Through our choice of solutions our Summit clients have been provided with the capability to proactively monitor within Summit and across other applications. Our core focus at Misys is to deliver integrated solutions to customers for true consolidation of risk management measures."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of financial market data, analytics and related solutions, announced it has signed an agreement to acquire the data and tools assets of Dow Jones & Company, Inc.’s Online Financial Solutions (“OFS”) business. The transaction is expected to be completed within the next several weeks, contingent upon customary closing conditions.
The OFS data and tools are used to develop and host Web-based solutions, including news, market data, research and advanced charting, portfolio management and alerting capabilities, for approximately 200 financial institutions, active investor services, and media Web portals. These OFS assets were formerly part of MarketWatch Licensing Services prior to the acquisition of MarketWatch, Inc. by Dow Jones in 2005. Dow Jones will retain its news business and enter into a non-exclusive redistribution agreement with Interactive Data to sell MarketWatch news to new and existing customers in the OFS market.
Interactive Data plans to integrate the acquired OFS assets into its U.S. Managed Solutions group, which is part of Interactive Data Real-Time Services. The Company expects to retain a number of employees currently affiliated with the OFS business, which has operations in Minneapolis, New York City and San Francisco. As part of the plans to migrate the OFS customers into Interactive Data’s technical infrastructure, Interactive Data and Dow Jones have entered into a transition services agreement for hosting and other related services for up to two years.
Interactive Data is a leading global provider of customizable, Web-based hosted solutions through its Managed Solutions group. More than 470 customers worldwide utilize the Company’s Web-based solutions to help address the information needs of their clients and internal users, differentiate their offerings, optimize workflows and reduce operating and capital costs. Acquiring the data and tools assets of the OFS business will substantially expand Interactive Data’s growing Web-based solutions business in North America. This acquisition will also create opportunities for Interactive Data to expand OFS’s existing relationships with major U.S.-based financial institutions by offering them a broader range of sophisticated Web-based offerings, real-time market data services and other desktop solutions.
“We believe that acquiring these OFS assets will further accelerate the progress we’ve made over the past several years to rapidly grow our Web-based solutions business in North America,” stated Ray D’Arcy, Interactive Data’s president and chief executive officer. “We see attractive opportunities for us to further expand OFS’s business with its institutional customers by offering them a much broader range of services and solutions. In addition, this acquisition will bring us valuable development and support resources that can help us further scale this part of our business.”
Assuming the transaction closes within the next several weeks, Interactive Data anticipates that the transaction will be cash flow positive and earnings neutral in 2009 and 2010, and, through a combination of planned revenue growth and operational synergies, accretive to earnings by 2011.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Numerix, the leading independent provider of cross-asset analytics for the structuring, valuation and risk analysis of derivatives and structured products, announced it was named Best Buy-Side Pricing/Valuation Service for 2009 by Buy-Side Technology Magazine.
The aim of the awards is to recognize the leading technologies and vendors in their areas of expertise through an auditable and transparent methodology underpinned by the input and experience of five buy-side-focused technology consultants: Investit, Knadel, Deloitte Consulting, Aite Group and Tabb Group.
According to BST editors, the best pricing and/or valuations category was one of the most keenly contested of all categories in the Buy-Side Technology Awards 2009. In all, eight companies entered this category, which is not altogether surprising, given how crucial this function has become too large numbers of buy-side firms. Numerix turned out to be the clear winner thanks to its range of tools developed specifically to model and price deals across a wide range of instruments including fixed income, credit, foreign exchange, hybrids, cross currency, inflation rate, and equity derivatives. Many of the world’s largest market data and trading system vendors offer access to Numerix analytics “inside” their own systems, resulting in increased interoperability across 3rd party vendor systems and consistent access to Numerix pricing models among buyside clients.
“We are extremely proud and honored to have won this Buy-SideTechnology award. It serves as a most fitting finale to an outstanding year overall for Numerix,” said Steven R. O’Hanlon, President and Chief Operating Officer at Numerix. “Proof of this success was Numerix being selected by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LBHI) to provide independent valuations on over 1 million derivatives contracts, representing one of the largest and arguably most complex derivatives books in the world. The success of the LBHI project was dependent on Numerix’s valuations and pricing expertise, coupled with our extensive partner network and our firm’s ability to bring together the necessary systems knowledge and best-of-breed data solutions.”
The 2009 Numerix Buyside Technology award win is a follow up to Numerix being named Technology Company of the Year in Asia for the second straight year in May of 2009 and also Technology Company of year in the America’s for the third straight year by Structured Products Magazine. The award win follows the May 2009 Celent Report which identified Numerix as the leader among its peers- providing advanced technology and functionality for pricing derivatives products, breath of cross asset coverage and depth of client services.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of financial market data, analytics, and related solutions, announced that its Fixed Income Analytics business has released BondEdge® Asset Manager.
This new package of capabilities is designed to assist portfolio managers and analysts at asset management firms manage relative risk and reward versus leading fixed income indices and liability benchmarks. The package can also help address the needs of investment professionals at organizations which manage their own fixed income funds internally, such as pension funds, endowments, and foundations.
For many years, asset management professionals have leveraged the robust analytical asset, portfolio and benchmark modeling tools and comprehensive security database coverage of Interactive Data’s market-leading BondEdge service for fixed income portfolio versus benchmark risk analysis, performance attribution, and compliance testing based upon client input guidelines.
“Heightened volatility of total returns dispersion between bond sectors and quality cohorts have underscored the need for enhanced granular portfolio versus benchmark risk analysis and performance attribution tools,” said Keith Webster, managing director, Interactive Data Fixed Income Analytics. “In addition, certain regulatory and accounting changes have heightened focus on the closer matching of portfolio and corresponding corporate pension liability risk characteristics. The analytical enhancements delivered with this latest release of BondEdge are a reflection of feedback provided by asset manager clients.”
“We appreciate the opportunity to work closely with Interactive Data to provide our perspective for the ongoing development of fixed income portfolio analytical tools for asset managers,” said Jay E. Schwister, Senior Portfolio Manager at Baird Advisors. “BondEdge provides analysis that helps our portfolio managers and analysts manage and report on the relative risk between portfolios and their relevant index or liability benchmarks.”
BondEdge Asset Manager is available via the BondEdge Next Generation platform, which is built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and provides a highly intuitive, flexible user interface. This newly released package of BondEdge capabilities includes enhancements to Factor-based Performance Attribution for taxable and tax-exempt portfolios and benchmarks and Liability Driven Investing analysis. Portfolio versus benchmark stress testing tools, “what-if” analytics for pre-trade simulations, and automated, flexible presentation style reports and graphics are also included.
BondEdge Next Generation includes an extensive structured finance deal library, cash-flow engine, and term structure and prepayment models, enabling clients to generate dynamic risk measures and asset cash flows for agency and non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities, including sub-prime issues, as well as asset-backed and commercial mortgage backed securities.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Odyssey Financial Technologies, a global provider of Asset Management software solutions and services, announces that its
InvestmentManager™ portfolio management system has been selected by one of the world's top 10 global custodians.
InvestmentManager™ will be progressively deployed to support its currency management services on a worldwide basis. Following an extensive selection process, InvestmentManager™ was identified as the best match for the organisation's strategic evolution, based on providing a scalable, currency-centric portfolio management system with comprehensive exposure monitoring. The corporate stability provided by Odyssey and its desire to work as a strategic partner were also key factors in the selection process. From early 2010, the global custodian will be using InvestmentManager™ to provide its clients with the ability to protect assets against adverse currency movements, using various financial instruments and hedging strategies.
InvestmentManager™ is an advanced, analytical front office decision support solution covering the full range of multi-asset, multi-currency portfolio management requirements. It is designed to give portfolio managers control, enabling faster and easier tracking of the investment process from historical performance and attribution through what-if and portfolio modelling to forward looking scenario analysis.
The latest version includes a powerful new element - Recon - providing daily data consistency checks for improved accuracy. This data quality aspect is particularly important for those customers using InvestmentManager™ to automate the execution of investment strategies on the basis of small changes in that underlying data.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Numerix, the leading independent provider of cross-asset analytics for the structuring, valuation and risk analysis of derivatives and structured products, announced it was named Best Buy-Side Pricing/Valuation Service for 2009 by Buy-Side Technology Magazine.
The aim of the awards is to recognize the leading technologies and vendors in their areas of expertise through an auditable and transparent methodology underpinned by the input and experience of five buy-side-focused technology consultants: Investit, Knadel, Deloitte Consulting, Aite Group and Tabb Group.
According to BST editors, the best pricing and/or valuations category was one of the most keenly contested of all categories in the Buy-Side Technology Awards 2009. In all, eight companies entered this category, which is not altogether surprising, given how crucial this function has become too large numbers of buy-side firms. Numerix turned out to be the clear winner thanks to its range of tools developed specifically to model and price deals across a wide range of instruments including fixed income, credit, foreign exchange, hybrids, cross currency, inflation rate, and equity derivatives. Many of the world’s largest market data and trading system vendors offer access to Numerix analytics “inside” their own systems, resulting in increased interoperability across 3rd party vendor systems and consistent access to Numerix pricing models among buyside clients.
“We are extremely proud and honored to have won this Buy-SideTechnology award. It serves as a most fitting finale to an outstanding year overall for Numerix,” said Steven R. O’Hanlon, President and Chief Operating Officer at Numerix. “Proof of this success was Numerix being selected by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LBHI) to provide independent valuations on over 1 million derivatives contracts, representing one of the largest and arguably most complex derivatives books in the world. The success of the LBHI project was dependent on Numerix’s valuations and pricing expertise, coupled with our extensive partner network and our firm’s ability to bring together the necessary systems knowledge and best-of-breed data solutions.”
The 2009 Numerix Buyside Technology award win is a follow up to Numerix being named Technology Company of the Year in Asia for the second straight year in May of 2009 and also Technology Company of year in the America’s for the third straight year by Structured Products Magazine. The award win follows the May 2009 Celent Report which identified Numerix as the leader among its peers- providing advanced technology and functionality for pricing derivatives products, breath of cross asset coverage and depth of client services.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Click here to find us on
DST International (DSTi), a leading provider of business solutions and services to the asset management sector, has launched a new web-based automated client reporting system, Reporter.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
DST International (DSTi), a leading provider of business solutions and services to the asset management sector, has launched a new web-based automated client reporting system, Reporter.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
DST International (DSTi), a leading provider of business solutions and services to the asset management sector, has launched a new web-based automated client reporting system, Reporter.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
DSTi has worked with top asset managers around the world for over 30 years across the broadest spectrum of investment styles and products and has drawn on this experience to deliver an end-to-end reporting solution that aims to meet and exceed the requirements of the most demanding investors. Reporter has realised reductions of up to 80% in cost efficiency and threefold improvements in turnaround while delivering consistently high-quality output.
Reporter, which is powered by Kurtosys technology and delivered as a managed service, will help clients to significantly reduce costs and implementation times and to progress from engagement to production in as little as 6 - 8 weeks. The managed service is designed to provide a flexible state-of-the-art solution to meet the premier standards in hosting, security, and business continuity. Reporter has no anticipated barriers to expansion as the service easily scales to accommodate clients’ expanding needs without an increase in their IT footprint.
DSTi has developed a comprehensive set of industry templates that underpin Reporter. These comprise hundreds of baselined industry reports, best practice workflows and standardised data models to manage the entire client reporting process. Taking data in from multiple systems through to delivery via the web, the solution is built on domain knowledge but also customisable to a client’s unique needs. Reports are fully personalised and branded for the asset manager, which ensures consistency and provides differentiation in the marketplace, building and strengthening client relationships.
Tom Abraham, Chief Executive Officer of DSTi said, “Client reporting is a high visibility action with a low efficiency equation. We are all too familiar with the issues and complexities our clients face in delivering reports, whether it is the cost of ownership, speed of turnaround and inflexibility or reports that simply do not reflect the quality and image of their organisation. Reporter brings together DSTi’s global scale and stability with Kurtosys’ ‘best of breed’ reporting platform. We believe that Reporter will not only increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but also deliver to clients a significant competitive advantage through the ability to customise and brand reports so that they become an integral part of the client management process.”
DSTi and Kurtosys already have mutual clients, such as Stanlib, which uses DSTi’s HiPortfolio Investment Accounting Application and the Kurtosys platform to produce monthly and quarterly reports. At Stanlib, this implementation has significantly increased report collation productivity and reduced reporting process cycles.
i-Performance-Analysis Ltd Registered in England & Wales no. 6357873 VAT no. 918715307 © 2007-9. all rights reserved
Use this Google search tool to find any reference to a topic on our website:
Panopticon Software, the leading provider of Treemap and Heatmap data visualization software announced that it has released version 5.4 of its Developer SDK. The new version offers improved data handling, faster visual processing, an expanded set of data visualizations, and support for Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) environments in addition to .NET and Java environments. This is the first SDK of its type available from any vendor that supports Microsoft WPF.
Developer 5.4 is a complete data visualization toolkit and can handle data from virtually any source, including real-time streaming data feeds. It is in widespread use within financial institutions as well as within a range of OEM applications in telecommunications, financial services and engineering.
The new release supports Microsoft WPF environments through a combination of the .NET SDK and a new WPF extension. WPF provides a unified framework for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows 7 and other operating system environments. It blends application UI, documents, and media content. WPF offers developers graphics support, hardware-accelerated effects, scalability to different form factors, interactive data visualization, and superior content readability. Developer 5.4 is also available for Java and traditional .NET environments. All three versions - WPF, .NET and Java - offer identical functionality.
Deployed applications utilizing Panopticon Developer include:
• Network monitoring and analysis in telecommunications networks
• Budgeting and scheduling analysis in engineering
• Performance monitoring and risk analysis in financial services
OEM partners who have integrated Panopticon's tools into their own products include:
• Deltek: Enterprise project management
• Polystar: Revenue assurance, fraud detection and network monitoring for telecoms
• Tbricks: Algorithmic trading for hedge funds and mutual fund companies
• Opturo: Risk management, performance reporting, GIPS compliance, order management, and quantitative modeling for financial firms
Willem De Geer, Managing Director of Panopticon, stated, "We started development of our SDK in 1999 and we're now in our fifth generation. This new release is the first data visualization SDK in the world that supports Microsoft WPF, which we see as an important new platform for business intelligence application development. The SDK enables Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) and companies with proprietary applications to embed highly interactive, highly configurable visual data analytics tools into their own software, regardless of whether they prefer Java, .NET or WPF development environments."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Princeton Financial Systems® (PFS), a leading provider of investment accounting, investment compliance, data management, performance measurement and reporting solutions to the global investment industry, announced the availability of MIG21 Data Manager. The new module for MIG21, PFS' award-winning investment compliance solution, provides data editing and maintenance functionalities to improve data quality and help minimize data-related compliance errors.
MIG21 Data Manager enables users to centrally maintain and add missing or incorrect compliance data such as fund or asset information, ratings as well as issuers and to easily configure new structured products or other asset classes. MIG21 Data Manager thus minimizes the time-lag between data changes, their correction in the back office system and subsequent upload into the compliance server. In combination with the Bloomberg Data Feed Connector Bloomberg data can be automatically imported to keep market data updated.
Sophisticated data override capabilities ensure that any automatically imported data overwrites manual data changes only according to pre-set rules. A maker/checker principle together with a full audit trail for all manual data changes ensures maximum data security of PFS’ new MIG21 data management solution. The solution also provides statistics for data imports. MIG21 Data Manager has been designed to work with MIG21 6.1 and above.
Hubert Gries, Product Manager Compliance and Order Management at PFS, emphasizes: "Many compliance officers struggle with data-related compliance errors: the back office system may not deliver all data needed for the compliance check, certain master data such as issuer information are either missing or incorrect or market data might not be current. The new MIG21 Data Manager is designed for this need. It is the first data solution that facilitates and accelerates data management in the compliance system to avoid errors during the check run. Together with MIG21, the solution caters perfectly to the growing demand in the market for a secure, future-proof and user-friendly solution to efficiently manage any kind of compliance information."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Advent Software, Inc., a leading provider of software and services for the global investment management industry, announced further expansion into the Asia Pacific region with the opening of a new office in Beijing. Staffed with more than 50 employees, the Beijing office is Advent’s largest office outside of North America and will play an important role in establishing the Company’s presence in mainland China.
The 50-plus employees in the Beijing office were previously part of Advent’s contract workforce with a Beijing software outsourcing firm, and have been working on the research and development of Advent’s portfolio of products for the past four years.
"We are excited to be expanding our presence in Asia Pacific, and we look forward to deepening our relationships with clients in the region," said Lily Chang, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Advent. "Having a presence in China is part of our growth strategy and is a must for a global company like Advent. The fast-growing China market is rapidly embracing new technology and we see enormous long-term potential in the Chinese market for our broad and innovative portfolio of investment solutions. As an industry leader with a proven history of success, Advent is well-prepared to support this growth."
Although this is the Company’s first office in mainland China, Advent established a full-time presence in Asia Pacific last year with the opening of its Hong Kong office, and the Company currently has more than 30 clients in the region. Advent’s Beijing office is located at 1218, China Resources Building, 8 Jianguomembei Avenue. It marks Advent’s 12th office worldwide; the Company also has a presence throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FinAnalytica, the leading provider of real world portfolio risk solutions for multi-manager funds, hedge funds and asset management firms, was recently included in Dow Jones Financial News’ annual list of technology firms for the 21st century as “an innovative company to watch in 2010.”
Accumulating the revenue figures, product announcements, client wins and geographical spread of leading technology firms, Financial News identified the top performing firms of 2009. Financial News has published its analysis on an annual basis for the past four years and can be viewed in full here. The report highlighted FinAnalytica’s innovative approach to risk awareness with particular reference to its “multi-currency, cross-asset system that offers returns-based and holdings-based solutions on a single platform”.
Boryana Racheva-Iotova, President, FinAnalytica, commented, “With the release of Cognity Version 3.0 earlier this year, the gap between quantitative and marketing groups has been bridged, and we have responded to our customers’ needs with integrated and flexible reporting. With new client wins this year and revenue and sales up by 33% and 210% respectively, 2010 will prove to be an exciting year for FinAnalytica”.
One UK-based senior consultant said of Cognity, “It is one of the few products on the market that seeks to exploit the myth about extreme events occurring once every hundred years. Using sophisticated modelling, it is able to assess the likelihood of these so-called fat-tailed risk events happening in the short term. In doing so, it gives its clients a competitive advantage in managing their portfolio risk.”
David Merrill, CEO, FinAnalytica, added, “FinAnalytica is delighted to be included in such a highly acclaimed industry analysis. To be recognised at this time illustrates not only the merits of FinAnalytica’s solutions, but highlights today’s environment of heightened risk awareness and the increased demand for state of the art solutions.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
SunGard has been named Software Provider of the Year by Private Equity News at their annual Awards for Excellence in Advisory Services. The award was won for SunGard’s Investran, a private equity solution that has been described as the industry standard platform for private equity.
The awards were created to recognize the successes of firms providing private equity advisory services. A panel of senior institutional investors, advisors, financiers and private equity practitioners voted for firms who achieved high standards of innovation and excellence in their field. SunGard’s Investran was selected from a shortlist of five nominees in the Software Provider of the Year category.
Emanuel Mond, president of SunGard’s alternative investments business, commented: “Despite a challenging year for many in this industry, SunGard’s Investran has weathered the storm well. This independent award acknowledges SunGard’s commitment to Investran’s expanding global customer base and the continuing development of the solution. The award comes on the back of the launch earlier this year of Investran version 6.0, a Web-based customer relationship management solution designed specifically for private equity and other alternative asset managers.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
StatPro Group plc, a leading provider of portfolio analytics and evaluation services for the global asset management industry, announces that Harris Investment Management, Inc. has signed a four-year contract for its GIPS® software.
The Chicago-based investment management firm is a member of BMO Asset ManagementTM (“BMO AM”), and primarily provides services to Endowment / Foundation, Corporate, Public and Taft-Hartley clients. As a group, BMO AM had $46.7 billion in assets under management (January 31, 2009).
Business analytics, marketing and client services staff in Chicago will be the end-users of the system, which features StatPro’s Composites module (a multi-currency tool for composite and account reporting to achieve and maintain GIPS® compliance) on a SaaS platform.
“We are delighted that Harris Investment Management has chosen us, initially signing a contract for our bureau service late last year,” said Mark Bramley, CEO North America at StatPro. “By January 2009, we were providing reports that included their reconciled historical data for up to thirteen years on some composites. In terms of this new implementation, we have set up almost 1,400 accounts comprising 39 composites.”
Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) are a set of ethical principles used by investment management firms. The principles establish a level playing field among asset managers in creating performance presentations that communicate investment results to prospective clients.
Jennifer K. George - Director, Investment Operations at Harris Investment Management, said: “We selected StatPro because it was clear that they had not only in-depth knowledge of the industry and GIPS requirements, but also superior customer service and attention to detail. They were able to help us transition to the StatPro system seamlessly and they continue to provide personalised support, driven by the specific needs of our firm. In addition, we find StatPro’s technology to be both reliable and robust.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Fidessa group plc, provider of award-winning trading solutions for the buy-side and sell-side, has received the coveted techMARK company of the year award. The awards, sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers, were held at the Lancaster London Hotel on Thursday 26th November 2009.
The key criteria for success in this award, which was sponsored by Piper Jaffray, are sound commercial and financial success and outstanding long-term growth potential. Previous winners include Autonomy Corporation plc, ARM Holdings plc and AVEVA Group plc.
Fidessa proved its worth over other shortlisted candidates with its noted technological achievements, fully accountable and well-managed business approach and its ability to successfully deliver commercial advantages that benefit both clients and shareholders.
Commenting on the win, Chris Aspinwall, CEO of Fidessa, said: “Fidessa is honoured to receive this award, particularly against a difficult macroeconomic backdrop. We work hard to develop innovative and robust technology across the buy- and sell-sides, and it is rewarding to see this approach paying off for our clients, and therefore our shareholders. As well as helping clients deal with the changing trading landscape, we have also invested in optimising the functionality of our solution to meet the specific needs of regions such as Asia, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East, and we look forward to building on this success in 2010.”
This latest accolade adds to a significant number of awards for Fidessa in 2009, including Financial News and Buy-Side Technology awards, and recognition in the Finextra Showcase for Innovation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Vermilion Software is delighted to announce that two large, Boston based Asset Management companies have gone live with the award winning Vermilion Reporting Suite for their institutional Client Communication.
The implementations took 4 and 5 months respectively, from initial analysis to go-live, and have resulted in significantly enhanced client communication capabilities for the organizations.
Vermilion Software’s client base within North America and Europe continues to flourish, complementing their strong presence within the United Kingdom.
A key driver in the vendor selection process is a solution’s ability to streamline reporting processes through efficient workflow capabilities, and deliver personalized reports from standardized templates, reducing the burden on IT departments, and freeing-up Fund Manager time to focus on core competencies.
David Mead, Vice President of North American operations at Vermilion, said: “The United States is a primary market for Vermilion Software, and we are delighted to continually attract the top investment management firms with our comprehensive client communication solutions.”
Simon Cornwell, co-founder, and Sales and Marketing Director at Vermilion, said “ever since inception, our goal has been to be the leading global client communication solutions provider to the institutional asset management industry, and our ever-growing list of client wins and implementations goes more towards asserting our position as the best of breed product.”
Vermilion Software is the leading solutions provider focused purely on Client Reporting for the Asset Management market globally. The award winning VRS has been designed to deliver accurate, flexible, and scalable client communications. VRS empowers client service professionals to deliver multilingual, graphical, marketing-quality reports, all of which can be created through the workflow process, streamlining the corporate reporting cycle whilst ensuring that the corporate branding and content standards are fully maintained. The solution provides a quick win for customers wishing to deliver high quality reporting, this is due to Vermilion’s unique product and their approach to project delivery. VRS is available as a hosted ASP service, or an in-house installation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of financial market data, analytics and related solutions, announced that it now delivers intraday fixed income valuations to help clients around the world more closely monitor portfolio value changes and provide European and Asian domiciled funds with new inputs to their fair value procedures.
Employing a variety of advanced analytics from Andrew Kalotay Associates, Inc. (Kalotay), Interactive Data now generates intraday values for a broad spectrum of fixed income instruments in all the major currencies. The service complements Interactive Data’s Basket Calculation Service, an intraday indicative pricing service, which also utilizes Kalotay analytics.
Interactive Data’s extended valuation capabilities include: hourly valuations for fixed rate securities from 07:00 GMT - 15:00 GMT in British pounds, euros, Swiss francs, Danish krone, and Swedish krona. In addition, hourly valuations are available in euros for floating rate securities. Hourly valuations from 07:00 GMT - 18:00 GMT are also available in U.S. dollars for fixed rate corporate, sovereign, treasury, municipal and agency bonds, fixed-rate mortgage-backed securities, and floating rate notes.
For European and Asian domiciled funds that invest in global fixed income securities, current market quotations may not be readily available for certain securities at the time of a fund’s valuation point. For example, a popular valuation point for U.K. domiciled funds is 12:00 GMT (07:00 ET), at which point the U.S. fixed income markets are not open. U.K.-domiciled funds that invest in U.S. fixed income securities may want to consider these intraday fixed income valuations as part of their fair value procedures. Similarly, the service may be of interest to funds in Asia that value their portfolios at local market close (09:00 GMT).
“We are excited to build on our capabilities in valuations, including in intraday indicative pricing, by offering an expanded intraday fixed income valuation service,” said Roger Sargeant, managing director, International, Interactive Data. “Using Kalotay’s fast, easy-to-implement calculation engines, we were able to respond in a timely fashion to client demand in this important area. Our new offerings enable clients to more closely monitor changes in portfolio values throughout the day, at points that fit in with their workflow, including during times when the local markets for certain securities are not open.”
Interactive Data delivers intraday fixed income valuations to clients through FTSSM, its flexible portfolio administration tool for the desktop. Intraday fixed income valuations are now also available to clients through PlusFeedSM, Interactive Data’s consolidated, low-latency datafeed.
“We are very pleased that Interactive Data selected our high-speed libraries to address their valuation needs,” said Andy Porter, managing director, Andrew Kalotay Associates.
Interactive Data currently provides intraday indicative valuations via the Basket Calculation Service to 11 clients - including three of the five largest ETF sponsors.1 The Company offers indicative intraday valuations for equity and fixed income ETFs, exchange traded notes (ETNs) and index values that include equities, fixed income securities, currencies and commodities.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
A recent survey of investment management firms by The Glass Hammer and Stone House Consulting Group, LLC, a strategic, operational and IT consulting firm for investment managers and hedge funds, found that investors, together with the investment consulting firms that advise those clients, are requiring more due diligence on investment managers than ever before, and that operational risk could rise at investment management firms because of staff cutbacks.
The survey, which included responses from more than 75 investment managers with nearly $7 trillion in assets under management, was conducted in conjunction with a recent event for senior women executives working in the buy-side investment community. The event was hosted by The Glass Hammer and sponsored by Omgeo, the global standard for post-trade efficiency, and Linedata Services, the global leader for investment management and credit technology.
The survey found that after sharp market declines, the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the discovery of fraudulent activities such as those of Bernie Madoff, Alan Stanford and others, 88% of respondents agreed that investors are spending more time and attention than ever before on due diligence, and were nearly unanimous that the importance of operations due diligence has risen.
“In the post-crisis world, where firms are rethinking fundamental issues such as risk, transparency, liquidity and regulation, investment managers need to be increasingly aware of the operational risk profile of their firm,” said Marianne Brown, CEO of Omgeo. "In this environment, investors are becoming more aware that an issue like counterparty risk can significantly impact their investments, and they’re taking a deeper look into key middle- and back-office issues, like reconciliation and collateral management, which can help reduce many of the unknown factors that currently exist in derivatives contracts."
The survey also showed that more than half of the respondents think that hedge funds will move to lower base management fees while traditional investment managers may begin to introduce performance-based fees.
“The findings indicate that operational risk may be on the rise, despite all the increased attention. Not only have staff cutbacks increased operational risk within many buy-side firms, but increased staff turnover as the employment market improves will cause operational risk profiles to deteriorate further,” said Holly Miller, Partner at Stone House Consulting.
“Gone are the days when funds could get through due diligence meetings with fancy spreadsheets. Potential investors now want to see proof that funds have prioritized the right infrastructure to track positions and value them properly,” said Annie Morris, Managing Director, Linedata Services. “Fund infrastructure has moved out of the shadows, and mission-critical systems provided by stable vendors are now having a real impact on those conversations.”
Other findings from the survey include 64% of respondents feel barriers of entry in the investment management business have increased in the last two years. Nonetheless, 87% think it is still possible to launch new firms and products.
The survey results ultimately found that successful firm leaders must be familiar with all aspects of their organization, from the investment decision-making process through the middle- and back-office, technology, compliance, client service and distribution. Managers are faced with margin pressures on two fronts:
• Increasingly costly infrastructures driven by compliance and risk management requirements;
• Downward pressure on fees and changing fee structures.
The winners will be those organizations who learn to navigate these conflicting tides most effectively.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Developer 5.4 is a complete data visualization toolkit and can handle data from virtually any source, including real-time streaming data feeds. It is in widespread use within financial institutions as well as within a range of OEM applications in telecommunications, financial services and engineering.
The new release supports Microsoft WPF environments through a combination of the .NET SDK and a new WPF extension. WPF provides a unified framework for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows 7 and other operating system environments. It blends application UI, documents, and media content. WPF offers developers graphics support, hardware-accelerated effects, scalability to different form factors, interactive data visualization, and superior content readability. Developer 5.4 is also available for Java and traditional .NET environments. All three versions - WPF, .NET and Java - offer identical functionality.
Deployed applications utilizing Panopticon Developer include:
• Network monitoring and analysis in telecommunications networks
• Budgeting and scheduling analysis in engineering
• Performance monitoring and risk analysis in financial services
OEM partners who have integrated Panopticon's tools into their own products include:
• Deltek: Enterprise project management
• Polystar: Revenue assurance, fraud detection and network monitoring for telecoms
• Tbricks: Algorithmic trading for hedge funds and mutual fund companies
• Opturo: Risk management, performance reporting, GIPS compliance, order management, and quantitative modeling for financial firms
Willem De Geer, Managing Director of Panopticon, stated, "We started development of our SDK in 1999 and we're now in our fifth generation. This new release is the first data visualization SDK in the world that supports Microsoft WPF, which we see as an important new platform for business intelligence application development. The SDK enables Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) and companies with proprietary applications to embed highly interactive, highly configurable visual data analytics tools into their own software, regardless of whether they prefer Java, .NET or WPF development environments."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Princeton Financial Systems® (PFS), a leading provider of investment accounting, investment compliance, data management, performance measurement and reporting solutions to the global investment industry, announced the availability of MIG21 Data Manager. The new module for MIG21, PFS' award-winning investment compliance solution, provides data editing and maintenance functionalities to improve data quality and help minimize data-related compliance errors.
MIG21 Data Manager enables users to centrally maintain and add missing or incorrect compliance data such as fund or asset information, ratings as well as issuers and to easily configure new structured products or other asset classes. MIG21 Data Manager thus minimizes the time-lag between data changes, their correction in the back office system and subsequent upload into the compliance server. In combination with the Bloomberg Data Feed Connector Bloomberg data can be automatically imported to keep market data updated.
Sophisticated data override capabilities ensure that any automatically imported data overwrites manual data changes only according to pre-set rules. A maker/checker principle together with a full audit trail for all manual data changes ensures maximum data security of PFS’ new MIG21 data management solution. The solution also provides statistics for data imports. MIG21 Data Manager has been designed to work with MIG21 6.1 and above.
Hubert Gries, Product Manager Compliance and Order Management at PFS, emphasizes: "Many compliance officers struggle with data-related compliance errors: the back office system may not deliver all data needed for the compliance check, certain master data such as issuer information are either missing or incorrect or market data might not be current. The new MIG21 Data Manager is designed for this need. It is the first data solution that facilitates and accelerates data management in the compliance system to avoid errors during the check run. Together with MIG21, the solution caters perfectly to the growing demand in the market for a secure, future-proof and user-friendly solution to efficiently manage any kind of compliance information."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Advent Software, Inc., a leading provider of software and services for the global investment management industry, announced further expansion into the Asia Pacific region with the opening of a new office in Beijing. Staffed with more than 50 employees, the Beijing office is Advent’s largest office outside of North America and will play an important role in establishing the Company’s presence in mainland China.
The 50-plus employees in the Beijing office were previously part of Advent’s contract workforce with a Beijing software outsourcing firm, and have been working on the research and development of Advent’s portfolio of products for the past four years.
"We are excited to be expanding our presence in Asia Pacific, and we look forward to deepening our relationships with clients in the region," said Lily Chang, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Advent. "Having a presence in China is part of our growth strategy and is a must for a global company like Advent. The fast-growing China market is rapidly embracing new technology and we see enormous long-term potential in the Chinese market for our broad and innovative portfolio of investment solutions. As an industry leader with a proven history of success, Advent is well-prepared to support this growth."
Although this is the Company’s first office in mainland China, Advent established a full-time presence in Asia Pacific last year with the opening of its Hong Kong office, and the Company currently has more than 30 clients in the region. Advent’s Beijing office is located at 1218, China Resources Building, 8 Jianguomembei Avenue. It marks Advent’s 12th office worldwide; the Company also has a presence throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FinAnalytica, the leading provider of real world portfolio risk solutions for multi-manager funds, hedge funds and asset management firms, was recently included in Dow Jones Financial News’ annual list of technology firms for the 21st century as “an innovative company to watch in 2010.”
Accumulating the revenue figures, product announcements, client wins and geographical spread of leading technology firms, Financial News identified the top performing firms of 2009. Financial News has published its analysis on an annual basis for the past four years and can be viewed in full here. The report highlighted FinAnalytica’s innovative approach to risk awareness with particular reference to its “multi-currency, cross-asset system that offers returns-based and holdings-based solutions on a single platform”.
Boryana Racheva-Iotova, President, FinAnalytica, commented, “With the release of Cognity Version 3.0 earlier this year, the gap between quantitative and marketing groups has been bridged, and we have responded to our customers’ needs with integrated and flexible reporting. With new client wins this year and revenue and sales up by 33% and 210% respectively, 2010 will prove to be an exciting year for FinAnalytica”.
One UK-based senior consultant said of Cognity, “It is one of the few products on the market that seeks to exploit the myth about extreme events occurring once every hundred years. Using sophisticated modelling, it is able to assess the likelihood of these so-called fat-tailed risk events happening in the short term. In doing so, it gives its clients a competitive advantage in managing their portfolio risk.”
David Merrill, CEO, FinAnalytica, added, “FinAnalytica is delighted to be included in such a highly acclaimed industry analysis. To be recognised at this time illustrates not only the merits of FinAnalytica’s solutions, but highlights today’s environment of heightened risk awareness and the increased demand for state of the art solutions.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
SunGard has been named Software Provider of the Year by Private Equity News at their annual Awards for Excellence in Advisory Services. The award was won for SunGard’s Investran, a private equity solution that has been described as the industry standard platform for private equity.
The awards were created to recognize the successes of firms providing private equity advisory services. A panel of senior institutional investors, advisors, financiers and private equity practitioners voted for firms who achieved high standards of innovation and excellence in their field. SunGard’s Investran was selected from a shortlist of five nominees in the Software Provider of the Year category.
Emanuel Mond, president of SunGard’s alternative investments business, commented: “Despite a challenging year for many in this industry, SunGard’s Investran has weathered the storm well. This independent award acknowledges SunGard’s commitment to Investran’s expanding global customer base and the continuing development of the solution. The award comes on the back of the launch earlier this year of Investran version 6.0, a Web-based customer relationship management solution designed specifically for private equity and other alternative asset managers.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
StatPro Group plc, a leading provider of portfolio analytics and evaluation services for the global asset management industry, announces that Harris Investment Management, Inc. has signed a four-year contract for its GIPS® software.
The Chicago-based investment management firm is a member of BMO Asset ManagementTM (“BMO AM”), and primarily provides services to Endowment / Foundation, Corporate, Public and Taft-Hartley clients. As a group, BMO AM had $46.7 billion in assets under management (January 31, 2009).
Business analytics, marketing and client services staff in Chicago will be the end-users of the system, which features StatPro’s Composites module (a multi-currency tool for composite and account reporting to achieve and maintain GIPS® compliance) on a SaaS platform.
“We are delighted that Harris Investment Management has chosen us, initially signing a contract for our bureau service late last year,” said Mark Bramley, CEO North America at StatPro. “By January 2009, we were providing reports that included their reconciled historical data for up to thirteen years on some composites. In terms of this new implementation, we have set up almost 1,400 accounts comprising 39 composites.”
Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) are a set of ethical principles used by investment management firms. The principles establish a level playing field among asset managers in creating performance presentations that communicate investment results to prospective clients.
Jennifer K. George - Director, Investment Operations at Harris Investment Management, said: “We selected StatPro because it was clear that they had not only in-depth knowledge of the industry and GIPS requirements, but also superior customer service and attention to detail. They were able to help us transition to the StatPro system seamlessly and they continue to provide personalised support, driven by the specific needs of our firm. In addition, we find StatPro’s technology to be both reliable and robust.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Fidessa group plc, provider of award-winning trading solutions for the buy-side and sell-side, has received the coveted techMARK company of the year award. The awards, sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers, were held at the Lancaster London Hotel on Thursday 26th November 2009.
The key criteria for success in this award, which was sponsored by Piper Jaffray, are sound commercial and financial success and outstanding long-term growth potential. Previous winners include Autonomy Corporation plc, ARM Holdings plc and AVEVA Group plc.
Fidessa proved its worth over other shortlisted candidates with its noted technological achievements, fully accountable and well-managed business approach and its ability to successfully deliver commercial advantages that benefit both clients and shareholders.
Commenting on the win, Chris Aspinwall, CEO of Fidessa, said: “Fidessa is honoured to receive this award, particularly against a difficult macroeconomic backdrop. We work hard to develop innovative and robust technology across the buy- and sell-sides, and it is rewarding to see this approach paying off for our clients, and therefore our shareholders. As well as helping clients deal with the changing trading landscape, we have also invested in optimising the functionality of our solution to meet the specific needs of regions such as Asia, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East, and we look forward to building on this success in 2010.”
This latest accolade adds to a significant number of awards for Fidessa in 2009, including Financial News and Buy-Side Technology awards, and recognition in the Finextra Showcase for Innovation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Vermilion Software is delighted to announce that two large, Boston based Asset Management companies have gone live with the award winning Vermilion Reporting Suite for their institutional Client Communication.
The implementations took 4 and 5 months respectively, from initial analysis to go-live, and have resulted in significantly enhanced client communication capabilities for the organizations.
Vermilion Software’s client base within North America and Europe continues to flourish, complementing their strong presence within the United Kingdom.
A key driver in the vendor selection process is a solution’s ability to streamline reporting processes through efficient workflow capabilities, and deliver personalized reports from standardized templates, reducing the burden on IT departments, and freeing-up Fund Manager time to focus on core competencies.
David Mead, Vice President of North American operations at Vermilion, said: “The United States is a primary market for Vermilion Software, and we are delighted to continually attract the top investment management firms with our comprehensive client communication solutions.”
Simon Cornwell, co-founder, and Sales and Marketing Director at Vermilion, said “ever since inception, our goal has been to be the leading global client communication solutions provider to the institutional asset management industry, and our ever-growing list of client wins and implementations goes more towards asserting our position as the best of breed product.”
Vermilion Software is the leading solutions provider focused purely on Client Reporting for the Asset Management market globally. The award winning VRS has been designed to deliver accurate, flexible, and scalable client communications. VRS empowers client service professionals to deliver multilingual, graphical, marketing-quality reports, all of which can be created through the workflow process, streamlining the corporate reporting cycle whilst ensuring that the corporate branding and content standards are fully maintained. The solution provides a quick win for customers wishing to deliver high quality reporting, this is due to Vermilion’s unique product and their approach to project delivery. VRS is available as a hosted ASP service, or an in-house installation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interactive Data Corporation, a leading provider of financial market data, analytics and related solutions, announced that it now delivers intraday fixed income valuations to help clients around the world more closely monitor portfolio value changes and provide European and Asian domiciled funds with new inputs to their fair value procedures.
Employing a variety of advanced analytics from Andrew Kalotay Associates, Inc. (Kalotay), Interactive Data now generates intraday values for a broad spectrum of fixed income instruments in all the major currencies. The service complements Interactive Data’s Basket Calculation Service, an intraday indicative pricing service, which also utilizes Kalotay analytics.
Interactive Data’s extended valuation capabilities include: hourly valuations for fixed rate securities from 07:00 GMT - 15:00 GMT in British pounds, euros, Swiss francs, Danish krone, and Swedish krona. In addition, hourly valuations are available in euros for floating rate securities. Hourly valuations from 07:00 GMT - 18:00 GMT are also available in U.S. dollars for fixed rate corporate, sovereign, treasury, municipal and agency bonds, fixed-rate mortgage-backed securities, and floating rate notes.
For European and Asian domiciled funds that invest in global fixed income securities, current market quotations may not be readily available for certain securities at the time of a fund’s valuation point. For example, a popular valuation point for U.K. domiciled funds is 12:00 GMT (07:00 ET), at which point the U.S. fixed income markets are not open. U.K.-domiciled funds that invest in U.S. fixed income securities may want to consider these intraday fixed income valuations as part of their fair value procedures. Similarly, the service may be of interest to funds in Asia that value their portfolios at local market close (09:00 GMT).
“We are excited to build on our capabilities in valuations, including in intraday indicative pricing, by offering an expanded intraday fixed income valuation service,” said Roger Sargeant, managing director, International, Interactive Data. “Using Kalotay’s fast, easy-to-implement calculation engines, we were able to respond in a timely fashion to client demand in this important area. Our new offerings enable clients to more closely monitor changes in portfolio values throughout the day, at points that fit in with their workflow, including during times when the local markets for certain securities are not open.”
Interactive Data delivers intraday fixed income valuations to clients through FTSSM, its flexible portfolio administration tool for the desktop. Intraday fixed income valuations are now also available to clients through PlusFeedSM, Interactive Data’s consolidated, low-latency datafeed.
“We are very pleased that Interactive Data selected our high-speed libraries to address their valuation needs,” said Andy Porter, managing director, Andrew Kalotay Associates.
Interactive Data currently provides intraday indicative valuations via the Basket Calculation Service to 11 clients - including three of the five largest ETF sponsors.1 The Company offers indicative intraday valuations for equity and fixed income ETFs, exchange traded notes (ETNs) and index values that include equities, fixed income securities, currencies and commodities.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
A recent survey of investment management firms by The Glass Hammer and Stone House Consulting Group, LLC, a strategic, operational and IT consulting firm for investment managers and hedge funds, found that investors, together with the investment consulting firms that advise those clients, are requiring more due diligence on investment managers than ever before, and that operational risk could rise at investment management firms because of staff cutbacks.
The survey, which included responses from more than 75 investment managers with nearly $7 trillion in assets under management, was conducted in conjunction with a recent event for senior women executives working in the buy-side investment community. The event was hosted by The Glass Hammer and sponsored by Omgeo, the global standard for post-trade efficiency, and Linedata Services, the global leader for investment management and credit technology.
The survey found that after sharp market declines, the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the discovery of fraudulent activities such as those of Bernie Madoff, Alan Stanford and others, 88% of respondents agreed that investors are spending more time and attention than ever before on due diligence, and were nearly unanimous that the importance of operations due diligence has risen.
“In the post-crisis world, where firms are rethinking fundamental issues such as risk, transparency, liquidity and regulation, investment managers need to be increasingly aware of the operational risk profile of their firm,” said Marianne Brown, CEO of Omgeo. "In this environment, investors are becoming more aware that an issue like counterparty risk can significantly impact their investments, and they’re taking a deeper look into key middle- and back-office issues, like reconciliation and collateral management, which can help reduce many of the unknown factors that currently exist in derivatives contracts."
The survey also showed that more than half of the respondents think that hedge funds will move to lower base management fees while traditional investment managers may begin to introduce performance-based fees.
“The findings indicate that operational risk may be on the rise, despite all the increased attention. Not only have staff cutbacks increased operational risk within many buy-side firms, but increased staff turnover as the employment market improves will cause operational risk profiles to deteriorate further,” said Holly Miller, Partner at Stone House Consulting.
“Gone are the days when funds could get through due diligence meetings with fancy spreadsheets. Potential investors now want to see proof that funds have prioritized the right infrastructure to track positions and value them properly,” said Annie Morris, Managing Director, Linedata Services. “Fund infrastructure has moved out of the shadows, and mission-critical systems provided by stable vendors are now having a real impact on those conversations.”
Other findings from the survey include 64% of respondents feel barriers of entry in the investment management business have increased in the last two years. Nonetheless, 87% think it is still possible to launch new firms and products.
The survey results ultimately found that successful firm leaders must be familiar with all aspects of their organization, from the investment decision-making process through the middle- and back-office, technology, compliance, client service and distribution. Managers are faced with margin pressures on two fronts:
• Increasingly costly infrastructures driven by compliance and risk management requirements;
• Downward pressure on fees and changing fee structures.
The winners will be those organizations who learn to navigate these conflicting tides most effectively.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Sophis, a leading provider of cross-asset, front-to-back portfolio and risk management solutions, announced that it has been named ‘best pricing and analytics - equities’, and ‘best trading systems, front-to-back office - equities’ in Risk magazine’s ‘Risk Technology Rankings 2009’.
Risk magazine polled thousands of banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and corporate treasurers for this year’s technology rankings, and received 2,437 responses.
Respondents were asked to vote for the technology vendors that provide the best product offering across a number of categories, including enterprise risk management, risk capital calculation, front-to-back office trading systems, and pricing and analytics. Participants were asked to base their votes on functionality, usability, performance, return on investment and reliability.
Pascal Xatart, CEO, Sophis said: “We are delighted that the investment industry has acknowledged our extensive risk management capabilities with this accolade. The last couple of years have been tough on the global economy and exposed some fundamental flaws in the financial landscape.
This tremendous honour is recognition of our commitment to helping our clients improve their risk management processes and trading systems, and our ability to adapt to our clients’ needs.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Algorithmics was once again voted the top enterprise-wide risk management vendor, receiving more first places in the enterprise-wide risk categories than any other vendor in the latest Risk Technology Rankings from Risk magazine.
Risk magazine, a leading financial risk management publication, established its annual technology rankings in 2004 to recognize best practice and innovation in the risk management industry by leading software vendors. Risk practitioners select the winning organizations based on their ability to best respond to the needs of their clients and address industry challenges.
Algorithmics was again recognized for providing superior risk solutions to help organizations go beyond measurement of risk and compliance, to provide users with tools to make risk-aware business decisions. This was reflected in the survey results where Algorithmics recorded 4 category wins, was voted in first or second place in 8 of the 10 enterprise risk categories (market, credit, risk dashboards, Basel II, integrated market and credit, counterparty and both operational risk categories) and overall secured 15 ‘Top 3’ positions.
Clive Davidson, contributing editor at Risk, said: “The big, established vendors with long track records have attracted the most votes, demonstrating banks are looking for technology firms that can provide a full range of services. Toronto-based Algorithmics has again proved to be the dominant risk management technology specialist. Aside from enterprise risk management and liquidity risk, Algorithmics has concentrated on providing business decision makers with risk analysis tools.”
Michael Zerbs, President and COO of Algorithmics, said: "Innovation is one of the cornerstones of Algorithmics’ success and we are committed to providing our clients with risk management solutions that meet the demands of fast-paced and changing markets. This award further validates our continued leadership in enterprise-wide risk management and we are proud to share this achievement with our clients.
“The past year has seen a reassessment of risk practices across the industry”, he continued. “Our clients identified three main challenges: first, how to get a timely, accurate and comprehensive perspective on firm-wide risk. Second, how to enable fully risk-aware business decisions at every level of their organization, from trading desk through to boardroom. Third, how to deal with ad-hoc demands for risk information from supervisors, regulators and other stakeholders.
“Our response has been to extend our Right Time initiative to bring accurate, comprehensive and timely risk information and analysis to those who need it, when they need it. Together with our continuing investment in innovation and close collaboration with our clients, we are delivering enterprise-wide technology solutions that help clients make informed, risk-aware business decisions.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought leaders from the investment management analytics space gathered last week to discuss ‘Trends in Attribution’ for an evening hosted by Orfival UK in London. Orfival manufactures and sells innovative software for the fund management industry. Its principal product ‘GPMS’ is totally modular; clients can pick and choose applications that suit them. One of the flagship modules is their portfolio performance, risk measurement and attribution application.
“Risk models and risk architecture will be of primary importance to asset managers in 2010, our evening was a very interesting forum to discuss and share ideas around this ever changing and highly topical area”, commented Torquil Warren, Head of Sales UK and Ireland for Orfival UK.
Philippe Gregoire PhD, Head of Product Development at Orfival commented, “We used this forum to gain a view of what key risk exposures the investment community will be facing in the year ahead and how they will be best positioned to prepare for 2010 from a analytics perspective”.
Guests in attendance were in agreement that Fund Managers need new unilateral models and ways of approaching risk in a decentralized market environment.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
StatPro Group plc, a leading provider of portfolio analytics and asset evaluations services for the global asset management industry, announces that MFC Global Investment Management (MFC GIM) has signed a contract for its GIPS compliance software. MFC GIM is the institutional asset management business of Manulife Financial Corporation.
Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) are a set of ethical principles used by investment management firms. The principles establish a globally standardised, industry-wide approach to creating performance presentations that communicate investment results to prospective clients.
The agreement is to utilize StatPro Composites (a multi-currency tool for composite and account reporting to achieve and maintain GIPS® compliance), through our SaaS platform.
“The purchase of the StatPro Composites system will enable MFC to manage GIPS compliance on a global basis using a single platform. The deal supports our position as the premier provider of composites management software” said Mark Bramley, CEO North America at StatPro.
The system will support MFC Global’s performance and analytics teams in London, Toronto, Boston, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Through our SaaS platform, the implementation will be much faster and less expensive to MFC than a traditional client-side installation would have been. Regardless of location, users will be able to access data and applications, share functions and reporting.
Jacqueline Allard, Vice President and CAO at MFC Global Investment Management, said: “StatPro was chosen because of the superior functionality of the system as well as its ability to support us on a global basis.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
GlobeOp Financial Services has been named “European Hedge Fund Administrator of the Year” by Funds Europe magazine, the latest honour among a wide range that recognised the company throughout 2009.
The Funds Europe judges commended GlobeOp for its “commitment to improving service to customers, thereby adding value to the asset management industry”.
Hans Hufschmid, CEO of GlobeOp said: “In a year which challenged the business model and operational capabilities of many administrators, awards judged by industry peers and clients further reinforce GlobeOp’s continued commitment to service quality and investment in people, processes and technology.”
The Funds Europe award followed a number of prestigious awards and rankings for GlobeOp in 2009, including:
• In December, GlobeOp was judged a Leader in Innovation in the Financial-i magazine awards, in the data management/data storage category.
• In November, GlobeOp ranked 51st in the FinTech100. This revenue-based ranking by analyst house IDC Financial Insights is drawn from over 400 companies deriving more than a third of their revenues from financial services.
• Also in November, GlobeOp ranked eighth among the largest administrators in HFM Week’s bi-annual assets under administration (AuA) survey. It also ranked third among largest administrators by percentage growth.
• In September, Hans Hufschmid, GlobeOp CEO, was inducted into Global Custodian's Hall of Fame for his contributions to shaping today’s securities services industry.
• In August, ranked in the Global Custodian Global Top 10, GlobeOp earned 54 best-in-class awards. The annual survey is based on client perceptions of service quality, expertise and value. GlobeOp also secured top-of-class ratings among $1 billion plus and multi-strategy administrators.
• For its thought leadership in identifying new market fundamentals that would reshape the hedge fund industry following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, GlobeOp won the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Big Apple Award for integrated business-to-business communications in May. The initiative was also highly commended "as providing a guiding light for hedge funds" at the UK PR Week awards in October.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
DST Global Solutions has launched the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute’s (CFA) Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM) program to its Asia business. Over the past 18 months, the company’s entire performance measurement solutions division has been awarded the CIPM certification program credential. Asia is the latest region to undergo the training, considered as the industry standard for performance measurement.
Rhodri Roberts, DST Global Solutions’ Head of Performance for Asia, said: “The CIPM serves as a valuable tool for our business as it demonstrates our dedication to excellence in the provision of performance measurement solutions to the investment management industry.
"The certificate also provides our clients with external, objective verification that DST Global Solutions delivers performance measurement solutions that are based on industry standards and best practice.”
The CIPM program offers the industry’s only designation dedicated solely to the specialised field of investment performance evaluation and presentation. It is designed to test candidates’ mastery of a specialised curriculum in the areas of ethics and performance evaluation, as well as the application of the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®). GIPS are a set of standardized, industry-wide ethical principles that provide investment firms with guidance on how to calculate and report their investment results to prospective clients.
DST Global Solutions and Colin Morrison, a member of GIPS’ Executive Committee and an independent industry consultant, have been working in close collaboration on a number of initiatives in order to promote best practice and stimulate greater interest in the ever more sophisticated field of performance measurement.
Des Gallacher, Head of Performance Solutions at DST Global Solutions, added: “The CIPM certification is a critical extension of DST Global Solutions’ investment in its performance solution (HiPerformance). We continually invest in HiPerformance to help the application’s functionality meet ever increasing market demands. Part of this investment goes towards enabling our staff to actively track trends in the performance measurement field and communicate the impact of these trends along with suggestions for necessary actions to our clients.”
Amongst other qualities, the certification recognizes a practitioner’s proficiency in applying analytical techniques and preparing GIPS-compliant presentations that guide investment firms in fairly representing and fully disclosing performance results.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
RIMES Technologies, the award-winning financial data integrator and performance solutions provider for the investment community, announced that ERSEL Sim S.p.A, the Italian and Luxembourg domiciled asset manager has selected Barra Performance on RIMES (BPR) to fulfil its performance measurement and attribution requirements.
Ersel represents development and tradition, with over 70 years of experience in asset management. Since 1936, the company capital has been held entirely by the family of the founder; the choice to stay completely independent has been pursued with tenacity and is the best guarantee of a trustworthy, transparent and objective appraisal for investment decisions.
Founded in Turin as ‘Studio Giubergia’, Ersel focused right from the outset on asset management services. Ahead of time, in 1983 it set up the first mutual fund management company authorised in Italy and, in 2000, was one of the pioneers in the hedge fund sector. With a staff of 170 people employed in its three offices in Italy and its office in Luxembourg, Ersel now offers its private and institutional clients tailor-made and highly-specialised private banking services.
Guido Giubergia, CEO for Ersel, confirmed “we currently manage assets in excess of €6.5B and 26 mutual funds. Barra Performance on RIMES will enable our performance team to produce performance measurement and attribution analysis on our equity and fixed income portfolios and analyse the sources of portfolio return using the MSCI Barra attribution model, reflecting our investment processes”.
Christian Fauvelais, CEO for RIMES said “we are delighted to be including Ersel in our client list. Barra Performance on RIMES simplifies the use of equity and fixed income benchmarks, which come pre-loaded and ready to be utilised: the Ersel performance team will have the wide range of high quality benchmark and market data from RIMES at their disposal, combined with the multi-asset class performance analytics from MSCI Barra”.
Roveen Bhansali, Managing Director and Head of the Analytics Business at MSCI Barra, said, “Barra Performance on RIMES provides high quality performance measurement and attribution analytics for multi-asset class portfolios. These analytics are a direct result of years of experience, research and listening to clients’ needs. We are excited to work with Ersel to help them fulfil their performance analytics needs.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
RIMES Technologies, the benchmark data management provider and recent winner of the Buy-Side Technology Award for Best Data Provider to the Buy-Side for the third consecutive year, announced the opening of its new Paris office, further increasing its presence in Europe.
Frédéric Mancuso, a co-founder of RIMES, will lead the new office which is located on Avenue de l’Opéra in the financial district of Paris. Renaud Larzillière joins him as Senior Program Manager to head the research and development team. Renaud was Senior Project Manager at SAP/Business Objects, responsible for Business Objects Enterprise major release projects. Renaud’s goal will be to develop and enhance RIMES’ innovative suite of portfolio management, performance measurement and attribution tools, as well as the various programming interfaces that allow quantitative analysts to access RIMES-hosted data from their desktop.
Emma Jayne Wood will be developing sales in the region. Emma Jayne brings a wealth of buy-side sales and business development experience to RIMES. Prior to joining RIMES, Emma Jayne was UK Operations Manager at BI-SAM Technologies, the Paris-domiciled reporting, performance & risk software solutions provider. During her 7-year tenure at BI-SAM, Emma Jayne held various business development and account management roles at senior level.
The RIMES office in Paris will provide local sales and support functions in a market identified as strategic for RIMES. “Technical support and customer service are vital components in any successful business and RIMES prides itself on providing best-in-class service to all of our clients regardless of location or time of day,” commented Christian Fauvelais, CEO, RIMES. “As our commercial reach in France grows, the opening of this new office in Paris supports our strong commitment to the French market and other French-speaking countries. We are very excited about this development.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Pricing Partners, the independent revaluation expert and a world leader in mathematical models and analytics for derivatives and structured products, announced the release of a new module providing VaR and Stress Tests calculations today.
With the recent unpredictable market movements, the accurate calculation of VaR, risks and stress tests on complex products has become a crucial issue for banks, risk control departments, asset managers and hedge funds. This new module, called Price-it VaR, responds to the following problems:
- Capture and manage your institutional risk and exposure across a variety of financial products and across various business units
- Measure the overall level of risks through Value at Risk (VaR and CVaR)
- Estimate the potential exposure with major sensitivities
- Stress-test your portfolios with customized and market crisis scenarios
- Respond to client and counterparty demands for advanced risk analyses and risk-adjusted performances
- Comply with evolving regulatory capital guidelines and gain maximum balance sheet efficiency
- Deliver a risk management solution that is sophisticated, scalable, and flexible, yet highly cost effective and simple to implement
Delivered online, Price-it VaR is a generic risk solution that leverages the Price-it financial library and the independent revaluation service Price-it Online. Price-it VaR is very exhaustive and comprehensive. It covers all major asset class derivatives from vanilla to the most exotics on interest rates, credit, foreign exchange (FX), equity, life insurance, inflation, commodity and hybrids. It is highly customizable, as users can virtually describe any financial products due to the generic Price-it payoff language. Users can easily design, manipulate and analyze information to create tailor made solutions and reports according to their needs.
Price-it VaR includes portfolio capture, security description, pricing engine, VaR and scenario engine reporting. This provides financial institutions looking for a risk management solution with one of the most powerful tools for leveraging years of experience and market practice in the trading environment.
Eric Benhamou, CEO of Pricing Partners and former Goldman Sachs remarked, "Price-it strengthens the VaR product range and Pricing Partners allows us to position ourselves as a global player in the world of revaluation and risk management on financial derivatives. Price-it VaR is unique and one of the most powerful modules trading VaR due to its flexibility. Price-it VaR synthesizes many years of experience and knowledge of markets and will interest many customers looking for a viable solution for VaR and Stress Tests. "
Founded by former professionals of the trading floor, working in investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, Natixis or HSBC, Pricing Partners has become a major player in the financial derivatives fields in the past two years. In October 2008, Pricing Partners launched its Internet independent revaluation platform, Price-it® Online, which affirms its leading place in financial modeling as well as an independent revaluations provider. Designed for all major assets like Interest Rates, Equity, Inflation, Credit, Foreign Exchange, Commodities, and Life Insurance to Hybrid products, Price-it® comes either as a software tools or an Internet Platform, providing all the tools for the transparent revaluation on structured products. Price-it® online uses cutting edge mathematical models together with a new language to describe the complexity of any structured products.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Kurtosys Systems Ltd announced that London & Capital have selected the Kurtosys Client Reporting solution for both client portfolio valuation reports and fund factsheets.
Following a market and competitor review of client reporting standards and vendor solutions, London & Capital found that there was scope for improvement in their existing reporting systems to meet client expectations for a modern and professional wealth management service. In addition, their existing report production process was characterised as having a high level of manual intervention from both the client services team and the IT department. London & Capital therefore took the decision to initiate a project to select a web based data management and reporting solution to address these challenges. An evaluation of market leading solutions resulted in Kurtosys being selected to support their client reporting requirements.
The initial phases of the implementation will focus on the delivery of the monthly and quarterly valuation reports underpinned by the configurable data management and workflow tools that are inherent in the Kurtosys solution. This will mean that London & Capital will be in a position to deploy a reporting data architecture that is built on a consistent data model designed to meet the requirements of parameterised reporting for clients as well as data consumers within the organisation. In a later phase of the project, London & Capital will benefit from the comprehensive client communications solutions stack, provided by Kurtosys, and deploy a client interactive Portal for self service client reporting.
Cliff Warner, Operations Director at London & Capital said, “We had previously looked at both the Kurtosys and FundWorks reporting solutions in isolation. However, the result of the acquisition of FundWorks by Kurtosys provided London & Capital with the desired technical capabilities as well as access to a significant industry domain expertise that will allow us to take our business forward and deliver state of the art reporting to our clients and achieve greater operational efficiencies."
Mash Patel, CEO of Kurtosys comments, “Recently published research on the key trends for the industry suggest organisations will be focusing on business agility and operational efficiency gains to build a positive growth strategy in 2010. By selecting our solution, London & Capital will be able to enhance their client service proposition thereby retaining their existing client base and attracting new business with a competitive differentiation."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ortec Finance, a global provider of technology and advisory services for risk and return management , has been selected by Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) a leading North European financial group, offering universal banking services including wholesale, investment and private banking services, to provide performance evaluation via Ortec Finance’s PEARL solution.
The Performance Attribution and Measurement system (PA) will allow SEB Wealth Management to improve evaluation for its institutional client base and help consolidate and improve methods company-wide. SEB Wealth Management will be able to address Investment Decision Levels and Structure above the mandate level and their related PA methods, increasing the efficiency and accuracy of its evaluation process across all areas of the business.
Ortec's PEARL solution offers flexible, reliable fully-automated performance measurement. Its unique design enables it to deal with investment decision processes (IDP) that involve a variety of asset classes, derivatives (overlays), and management styles, delivering solid figures on how investments truly perform.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Asset Control, the world-wide leader in financial data management solutions, received several awards as an innovator and proven software provider throughout 2009, as well as enjoyed a record year in terms of new client signings and success in completing an aggressive agenda of new products and enhancements.
2009 Awards and Recognition
Asset Control won the following industry awards in 2009:
• “Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor” by readers of Inside Reference Data in May 2009
• “Best Enterprise Data Management/Reference Data Product” in Banking Technology magazine’s third annual Readers’ Choice Awards in November 2009
• Financial-i magazine’s fourth annual “Leaders in Innovation” Award for Enterprise Data Management (EDM) in December 2009
In addition, Asset Control was recognized as a leading innovator in financial markets technology by Financial News in its 4th annual “Tech 21” list of innovators and market leaders for the 21st century, as published in November 2009. Asset Control was chosen for its well-timed upgrades and launch of new products to meet industry needs, and for its success in gaining new clients despite the economic downturn.
Historic, Record Year for New Clients
Asset Control continues strong organic growth by adding more new clients in 2009 than any other year on record since the company was founded in 1991. Financial institutions across the industry and global spectrum-including hedge funds, insurance firms, asset managers, and commercial and investment banks in North America, Europe, UK and Asia-selected Asset Control for data management. Among these new clients signed in 2009 are Ping An Insurance (Group) of China and Investment Technology Group (ITG). Asset Control is expanding its team and operations to support its growing, global customer base.
New Product Launch and Key Innovations
Asset Control successfully completed an aggressive program of product enhancements designed to help customers meet the challenges of pricing and valuation, business entity data and counterparty risk, as well as help financial institutions in Asia expand their businesses and become more globally invested. The company also launched a revolutionary new data management product, AC Invest, creating a new paradigm that allows clients to adopt a role- and consumption-based data management approach suited to their specific business operations.
Asset Control’s key product innovations in 2009 included:
• Launch of the new AC Invest product for role-based data management compliance
• Enhanced desktop capabilities for price discovery and valuation
• New native language support for Asia
• Avox partnership to enhance business entity data quality and workflow
• Expanded Fitch Ratings credit and issuer coverage
• Added fully supported FinChina feed handler
In 2010, Asset Control’s product development roadmap will focus on helping clients gain greater efficiencies in data management, improve risk management and compliance, and enhance the distribution of and access to data throughout their organizations.
Phil Lynch, Asset Control’s president and chief executive officer, said, “Asset Control’s new product innovations and enhancements, rapid implementation methodologies, and unique and flexible approach to helping customers align the management of data with their specific business goals have all contributed to the recognition it continues to receive in the financial services industry-in the form of awards and new clients. By making steady investments in our solutions, we are able to help firms accelerate their time to market, resolve the data management issues that continue to play a critical role in their ability to overcome specific business challenges, and equip them to meet new requirements in the future.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
A unique Barrington Partners research offers a detailed look at nine outsourcing vendors, including the functionality they provide, their operational capability, the underlying technology they employ and importantly the implementation/conversion process offered by each vendor. The following service providers are included in the 2009 review:
• Brown Brothers Harriman
• Bank of New York/Mellon
• Citi
• iX Partners
• JPMorgan Chase
• Northern Trust
• SS&C
• SEI
• State Street
The Review contains an overview of the industry and its trends, summary results tables for each provider, a glossary, and detailed provider reviews. These detailed reviews are in a common format to allow for comparison among vendors and their providers, and include user comments throught as well in summary form. Because there is no single "best" service provider in the marketplace, providers are not rated. Barrington Partners research can help clients find a good match between their needs and a provider's capabilities and pricing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
The EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre recently announced the appointment of Mr. Ton van Welie, Chief Executive Officer of Ortec Finance, to its international advisory board.
As CEO of Ortec Finance since 2006, Mr. van Welie oversees the daily operations of the company. He has been with Ortec Finance for over fifteen years. Mr. van Welie graduated from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam with an MSc in Econometrics. He has maintained strong links with academia teaching as a guest lecturer, and has published in various professional journals.
The 35 members of the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre international advisory board are responsible for validating the relevance and goals of the research programme proposals presented by the centre's management and for evaluating research outcomes with respect to their potential impact on industry practices.
The EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre and Ortec Finance have created a research chair in Private ALM focused on understanding the application of Asset-Liability Management (ALM) methodology in Private Wealth Management (PWM). The research chair is a three-year research programme piloted by a joint Ortec Finance/EDHEC committee.
Risk magazine polled thousands of banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and corporate treasurers for this year’s technology rankings, and received 2,437 responses.
Respondents were asked to vote for the technology vendors that provide the best product offering across a number of categories, including enterprise risk management, risk capital calculation, front-to-back office trading systems, and pricing and analytics. Participants were asked to base their votes on functionality, usability, performance, return on investment and reliability.
Pascal Xatart, CEO, Sophis said: “We are delighted that the investment industry has acknowledged our extensive risk management capabilities with this accolade. The last couple of years have been tough on the global economy and exposed some fundamental flaws in the financial landscape.
This tremendous honour is recognition of our commitment to helping our clients improve their risk management processes and trading systems, and our ability to adapt to our clients’ needs.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Algorithmics was once again voted the top enterprise-wide risk management vendor, receiving more first places in the enterprise-wide risk categories than any other vendor in the latest Risk Technology Rankings from Risk magazine.
Risk magazine, a leading financial risk management publication, established its annual technology rankings in 2004 to recognize best practice and innovation in the risk management industry by leading software vendors. Risk practitioners select the winning organizations based on their ability to best respond to the needs of their clients and address industry challenges.
Algorithmics was again recognized for providing superior risk solutions to help organizations go beyond measurement of risk and compliance, to provide users with tools to make risk-aware business decisions. This was reflected in the survey results where Algorithmics recorded 4 category wins, was voted in first or second place in 8 of the 10 enterprise risk categories (market, credit, risk dashboards, Basel II, integrated market and credit, counterparty and both operational risk categories) and overall secured 15 ‘Top 3’ positions.
Clive Davidson, contributing editor at Risk, said: “The big, established vendors with long track records have attracted the most votes, demonstrating banks are looking for technology firms that can provide a full range of services. Toronto-based Algorithmics has again proved to be the dominant risk management technology specialist. Aside from enterprise risk management and liquidity risk, Algorithmics has concentrated on providing business decision makers with risk analysis tools.”
Michael Zerbs, President and COO of Algorithmics, said: "Innovation is one of the cornerstones of Algorithmics’ success and we are committed to providing our clients with risk management solutions that meet the demands of fast-paced and changing markets. This award further validates our continued leadership in enterprise-wide risk management and we are proud to share this achievement with our clients.
“The past year has seen a reassessment of risk practices across the industry”, he continued. “Our clients identified three main challenges: first, how to get a timely, accurate and comprehensive perspective on firm-wide risk. Second, how to enable fully risk-aware business decisions at every level of their organization, from trading desk through to boardroom. Third, how to deal with ad-hoc demands for risk information from supervisors, regulators and other stakeholders.
“Our response has been to extend our Right Time initiative to bring accurate, comprehensive and timely risk information and analysis to those who need it, when they need it. Together with our continuing investment in innovation and close collaboration with our clients, we are delivering enterprise-wide technology solutions that help clients make informed, risk-aware business decisions.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Thought leaders from the investment management analytics space gathered last week to discuss ‘Trends in Attribution’ for an evening hosted by Orfival UK in London. Orfival manufactures and sells innovative software for the fund management industry. Its principal product ‘GPMS’ is totally modular; clients can pick and choose applications that suit them. One of the flagship modules is their portfolio performance, risk measurement and attribution application.
“Risk models and risk architecture will be of primary importance to asset managers in 2010, our evening was a very interesting forum to discuss and share ideas around this ever changing and highly topical area”, commented Torquil Warren, Head of Sales UK and Ireland for Orfival UK.
Philippe Gregoire PhD, Head of Product Development at Orfival commented, “We used this forum to gain a view of what key risk exposures the investment community will be facing in the year ahead and how they will be best positioned to prepare for 2010 from a analytics perspective”.
Guests in attendance were in agreement that Fund Managers need new unilateral models and ways of approaching risk in a decentralized market environment.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
StatPro Group plc, a leading provider of portfolio analytics and asset evaluations services for the global asset management industry, announces that MFC Global Investment Management (MFC GIM) has signed a contract for its GIPS compliance software. MFC GIM is the institutional asset management business of Manulife Financial Corporation.
Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) are a set of ethical principles used by investment management firms. The principles establish a globally standardised, industry-wide approach to creating performance presentations that communicate investment results to prospective clients.
The agreement is to utilize StatPro Composites (a multi-currency tool for composite and account reporting to achieve and maintain GIPS® compliance), through our SaaS platform.
“The purchase of the StatPro Composites system will enable MFC to manage GIPS compliance on a global basis using a single platform. The deal supports our position as the premier provider of composites management software” said Mark Bramley, CEO North America at StatPro.
The system will support MFC Global’s performance and analytics teams in London, Toronto, Boston, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Through our SaaS platform, the implementation will be much faster and less expensive to MFC than a traditional client-side installation would have been. Regardless of location, users will be able to access data and applications, share functions and reporting.
Jacqueline Allard, Vice President and CAO at MFC Global Investment Management, said: “StatPro was chosen because of the superior functionality of the system as well as its ability to support us on a global basis.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
GlobeOp Financial Services has been named “European Hedge Fund Administrator of the Year” by Funds Europe magazine, the latest honour among a wide range that recognised the company throughout 2009.
The Funds Europe judges commended GlobeOp for its “commitment to improving service to customers, thereby adding value to the asset management industry”.
Hans Hufschmid, CEO of GlobeOp said: “In a year which challenged the business model and operational capabilities of many administrators, awards judged by industry peers and clients further reinforce GlobeOp’s continued commitment to service quality and investment in people, processes and technology.”
The Funds Europe award followed a number of prestigious awards and rankings for GlobeOp in 2009, including:
• In December, GlobeOp was judged a Leader in Innovation in the Financial-i magazine awards, in the data management/data storage category.
• In November, GlobeOp ranked 51st in the FinTech100. This revenue-based ranking by analyst house IDC Financial Insights is drawn from over 400 companies deriving more than a third of their revenues from financial services.
• Also in November, GlobeOp ranked eighth among the largest administrators in HFM Week’s bi-annual assets under administration (AuA) survey. It also ranked third among largest administrators by percentage growth.
• In September, Hans Hufschmid, GlobeOp CEO, was inducted into Global Custodian's Hall of Fame for his contributions to shaping today’s securities services industry.
• In August, ranked in the Global Custodian Global Top 10, GlobeOp earned 54 best-in-class awards. The annual survey is based on client perceptions of service quality, expertise and value. GlobeOp also secured top-of-class ratings among $1 billion plus and multi-strategy administrators.
• For its thought leadership in identifying new market fundamentals that would reshape the hedge fund industry following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, GlobeOp won the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Big Apple Award for integrated business-to-business communications in May. The initiative was also highly commended "as providing a guiding light for hedge funds" at the UK PR Week awards in October.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
DST Global Solutions has launched the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute’s (CFA) Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM) program to its Asia business. Over the past 18 months, the company’s entire performance measurement solutions division has been awarded the CIPM certification program credential. Asia is the latest region to undergo the training, considered as the industry standard for performance measurement.
Rhodri Roberts, DST Global Solutions’ Head of Performance for Asia, said: “The CIPM serves as a valuable tool for our business as it demonstrates our dedication to excellence in the provision of performance measurement solutions to the investment management industry.
"The certificate also provides our clients with external, objective verification that DST Global Solutions delivers performance measurement solutions that are based on industry standards and best practice.”
The CIPM program offers the industry’s only designation dedicated solely to the specialised field of investment performance evaluation and presentation. It is designed to test candidates’ mastery of a specialised curriculum in the areas of ethics and performance evaluation, as well as the application of the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®). GIPS are a set of standardized, industry-wide ethical principles that provide investment firms with guidance on how to calculate and report their investment results to prospective clients.
DST Global Solutions and Colin Morrison, a member of GIPS’ Executive Committee and an independent industry consultant, have been working in close collaboration on a number of initiatives in order to promote best practice and stimulate greater interest in the ever more sophisticated field of performance measurement.
Des Gallacher, Head of Performance Solutions at DST Global Solutions, added: “The CIPM certification is a critical extension of DST Global Solutions’ investment in its performance solution (HiPerformance). We continually invest in HiPerformance to help the application’s functionality meet ever increasing market demands. Part of this investment goes towards enabling our staff to actively track trends in the performance measurement field and communicate the impact of these trends along with suggestions for necessary actions to our clients.”
Amongst other qualities, the certification recognizes a practitioner’s proficiency in applying analytical techniques and preparing GIPS-compliant presentations that guide investment firms in fairly representing and fully disclosing performance results.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
RIMES Technologies, the award-winning financial data integrator and performance solutions provider for the investment community, announced that ERSEL Sim S.p.A, the Italian and Luxembourg domiciled asset manager has selected Barra Performance on RIMES (BPR) to fulfil its performance measurement and attribution requirements.
Ersel represents development and tradition, with over 70 years of experience in asset management. Since 1936, the company capital has been held entirely by the family of the founder; the choice to stay completely independent has been pursued with tenacity and is the best guarantee of a trustworthy, transparent and objective appraisal for investment decisions.
Founded in Turin as ‘Studio Giubergia’, Ersel focused right from the outset on asset management services. Ahead of time, in 1983 it set up the first mutual fund management company authorised in Italy and, in 2000, was one of the pioneers in the hedge fund sector. With a staff of 170 people employed in its three offices in Italy and its office in Luxembourg, Ersel now offers its private and institutional clients tailor-made and highly-specialised private banking services.
Guido Giubergia, CEO for Ersel, confirmed “we currently manage assets in excess of €6.5B and 26 mutual funds. Barra Performance on RIMES will enable our performance team to produce performance measurement and attribution analysis on our equity and fixed income portfolios and analyse the sources of portfolio return using the MSCI Barra attribution model, reflecting our investment processes”.
Christian Fauvelais, CEO for RIMES said “we are delighted to be including Ersel in our client list. Barra Performance on RIMES simplifies the use of equity and fixed income benchmarks, which come pre-loaded and ready to be utilised: the Ersel performance team will have the wide range of high quality benchmark and market data from RIMES at their disposal, combined with the multi-asset class performance analytics from MSCI Barra”.
Roveen Bhansali, Managing Director and Head of the Analytics Business at MSCI Barra, said, “Barra Performance on RIMES provides high quality performance measurement and attribution analytics for multi-asset class portfolios. These analytics are a direct result of years of experience, research and listening to clients’ needs. We are excited to work with Ersel to help them fulfil their performance analytics needs.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
RIMES Technologies, the benchmark data management provider and recent winner of the Buy-Side Technology Award for Best Data Provider to the Buy-Side for the third consecutive year, announced the opening of its new Paris office, further increasing its presence in Europe.
Frédéric Mancuso, a co-founder of RIMES, will lead the new office which is located on Avenue de l’Opéra in the financial district of Paris. Renaud Larzillière joins him as Senior Program Manager to head the research and development team. Renaud was Senior Project Manager at SAP/Business Objects, responsible for Business Objects Enterprise major release projects. Renaud’s goal will be to develop and enhance RIMES’ innovative suite of portfolio management, performance measurement and attribution tools, as well as the various programming interfaces that allow quantitative analysts to access RIMES-hosted data from their desktop.
Emma Jayne Wood will be developing sales in the region. Emma Jayne brings a wealth of buy-side sales and business development experience to RIMES. Prior to joining RIMES, Emma Jayne was UK Operations Manager at BI-SAM Technologies, the Paris-domiciled reporting, performance & risk software solutions provider. During her 7-year tenure at BI-SAM, Emma Jayne held various business development and account management roles at senior level.
The RIMES office in Paris will provide local sales and support functions in a market identified as strategic for RIMES. “Technical support and customer service are vital components in any successful business and RIMES prides itself on providing best-in-class service to all of our clients regardless of location or time of day,” commented Christian Fauvelais, CEO, RIMES. “As our commercial reach in France grows, the opening of this new office in Paris supports our strong commitment to the French market and other French-speaking countries. We are very excited about this development.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Pricing Partners, the independent revaluation expert and a world leader in mathematical models and analytics for derivatives and structured products, announced the release of a new module providing VaR and Stress Tests calculations today.
With the recent unpredictable market movements, the accurate calculation of VaR, risks and stress tests on complex products has become a crucial issue for banks, risk control departments, asset managers and hedge funds. This new module, called Price-it VaR, responds to the following problems:
- Capture and manage your institutional risk and exposure across a variety of financial products and across various business units
- Measure the overall level of risks through Value at Risk (VaR and CVaR)
- Estimate the potential exposure with major sensitivities
- Stress-test your portfolios with customized and market crisis scenarios
- Respond to client and counterparty demands for advanced risk analyses and risk-adjusted performances
- Comply with evolving regulatory capital guidelines and gain maximum balance sheet efficiency
- Deliver a risk management solution that is sophisticated, scalable, and flexible, yet highly cost effective and simple to implement
Delivered online, Price-it VaR is a generic risk solution that leverages the Price-it financial library and the independent revaluation service Price-it Online. Price-it VaR is very exhaustive and comprehensive. It covers all major asset class derivatives from vanilla to the most exotics on interest rates, credit, foreign exchange (FX), equity, life insurance, inflation, commodity and hybrids. It is highly customizable, as users can virtually describe any financial products due to the generic Price-it payoff language. Users can easily design, manipulate and analyze information to create tailor made solutions and reports according to their needs.
Price-it VaR includes portfolio capture, security description, pricing engine, VaR and scenario engine reporting. This provides financial institutions looking for a risk management solution with one of the most powerful tools for leveraging years of experience and market practice in the trading environment.
Eric Benhamou, CEO of Pricing Partners and former Goldman Sachs remarked, "Price-it strengthens the VaR product range and Pricing Partners allows us to position ourselves as a global player in the world of revaluation and risk management on financial derivatives. Price-it VaR is unique and one of the most powerful modules trading VaR due to its flexibility. Price-it VaR synthesizes many years of experience and knowledge of markets and will interest many customers looking for a viable solution for VaR and Stress Tests. "
Founded by former professionals of the trading floor, working in investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, Natixis or HSBC, Pricing Partners has become a major player in the financial derivatives fields in the past two years. In October 2008, Pricing Partners launched its Internet independent revaluation platform, Price-it® Online, which affirms its leading place in financial modeling as well as an independent revaluations provider. Designed for all major assets like Interest Rates, Equity, Inflation, Credit, Foreign Exchange, Commodities, and Life Insurance to Hybrid products, Price-it® comes either as a software tools or an Internet Platform, providing all the tools for the transparent revaluation on structured products. Price-it® online uses cutting edge mathematical models together with a new language to describe the complexity of any structured products.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Kurtosys Systems Ltd announced that London & Capital have selected the Kurtosys Client Reporting solution for both client portfolio valuation reports and fund factsheets.
Following a market and competitor review of client reporting standards and vendor solutions, London & Capital found that there was scope for improvement in their existing reporting systems to meet client expectations for a modern and professional wealth management service. In addition, their existing report production process was characterised as having a high level of manual intervention from both the client services team and the IT department. London & Capital therefore took the decision to initiate a project to select a web based data management and reporting solution to address these challenges. An evaluation of market leading solutions resulted in Kurtosys being selected to support their client reporting requirements.
The initial phases of the implementation will focus on the delivery of the monthly and quarterly valuation reports underpinned by the configurable data management and workflow tools that are inherent in the Kurtosys solution. This will mean that London & Capital will be in a position to deploy a reporting data architecture that is built on a consistent data model designed to meet the requirements of parameterised reporting for clients as well as data consumers within the organisation. In a later phase of the project, London & Capital will benefit from the comprehensive client communications solutions stack, provided by Kurtosys, and deploy a client interactive Portal for self service client reporting.
Cliff Warner, Operations Director at London & Capital said, “We had previously looked at both the Kurtosys and FundWorks reporting solutions in isolation. However, the result of the acquisition of FundWorks by Kurtosys provided London & Capital with the desired technical capabilities as well as access to a significant industry domain expertise that will allow us to take our business forward and deliver state of the art reporting to our clients and achieve greater operational efficiencies."
Mash Patel, CEO of Kurtosys comments, “Recently published research on the key trends for the industry suggest organisations will be focusing on business agility and operational efficiency gains to build a positive growth strategy in 2010. By selecting our solution, London & Capital will be able to enhance their client service proposition thereby retaining their existing client base and attracting new business with a competitive differentiation."
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ortec Finance, a global provider of technology and advisory services for risk and return management , has been selected by Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) a leading North European financial group, offering universal banking services including wholesale, investment and private banking services, to provide performance evaluation via Ortec Finance’s PEARL solution.
The Performance Attribution and Measurement system (PA) will allow SEB Wealth Management to improve evaluation for its institutional client base and help consolidate and improve methods company-wide. SEB Wealth Management will be able to address Investment Decision Levels and Structure above the mandate level and their related PA methods, increasing the efficiency and accuracy of its evaluation process across all areas of the business.
Ortec's PEARL solution offers flexible, reliable fully-automated performance measurement. Its unique design enables it to deal with investment decision processes (IDP) that involve a variety of asset classes, derivatives (overlays), and management styles, delivering solid figures on how investments truly perform.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Asset Control, the world-wide leader in financial data management solutions, received several awards as an innovator and proven software provider throughout 2009, as well as enjoyed a record year in terms of new client signings and success in completing an aggressive agenda of new products and enhancements.
2009 Awards and Recognition
Asset Control won the following industry awards in 2009:
• “Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor” by readers of Inside Reference Data in May 2009
• “Best Enterprise Data Management/Reference Data Product” in Banking Technology magazine’s third annual Readers’ Choice Awards in November 2009
• Financial-i magazine’s fourth annual “Leaders in Innovation” Award for Enterprise Data Management (EDM) in December 2009
In addition, Asset Control was recognized as a leading innovator in financial markets technology by Financial News in its 4th annual “Tech 21” list of innovators and market leaders for the 21st century, as published in November 2009. Asset Control was chosen for its well-timed upgrades and launch of new products to meet industry needs, and for its success in gaining new clients despite the economic downturn.
Historic, Record Year for New Clients
Asset Control continues strong organic growth by adding more new clients in 2009 than any other year on record since the company was founded in 1991. Financial institutions across the industry and global spectrum-including hedge funds, insurance firms, asset managers, and commercial and investment banks in North America, Europe, UK and Asia-selected Asset Control for data management. Among these new clients signed in 2009 are Ping An Insurance (Group) of China and Investment Technology Group (ITG). Asset Control is expanding its team and operations to support its growing, global customer base.
New Product Launch and Key Innovations
Asset Control successfully completed an aggressive program of product enhancements designed to help customers meet the challenges of pricing and valuation, business entity data and counterparty risk, as well as help financial institutions in Asia expand their businesses and become more globally invested. The company also launched a revolutionary new data management product, AC Invest, creating a new paradigm that allows clients to adopt a role- and consumption-based data management approach suited to their specific business operations.
Asset Control’s key product innovations in 2009 included:
• Launch of the new AC Invest product for role-based data management compliance
• Enhanced desktop capabilities for price discovery and valuation
• New native language support for Asia
• Avox partnership to enhance business entity data quality and workflow
• Expanded Fitch Ratings credit and issuer coverage
• Added fully supported FinChina feed handler
In 2010, Asset Control’s product development roadmap will focus on helping clients gain greater efficiencies in data management, improve risk management and compliance, and enhance the distribution of and access to data throughout their organizations.
Phil Lynch, Asset Control’s president and chief executive officer, said, “Asset Control’s new product innovations and enhancements, rapid implementation methodologies, and unique and flexible approach to helping customers align the management of data with their specific business goals have all contributed to the recognition it continues to receive in the financial services industry-in the form of awards and new clients. By making steady investments in our solutions, we are able to help firms accelerate their time to market, resolve the data management issues that continue to play a critical role in their ability to overcome specific business challenges, and equip them to meet new requirements in the future.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
A unique Barrington Partners research offers a detailed look at nine outsourcing vendors, including the functionality they provide, their operational capability, the underlying technology they employ and importantly the implementation/conversion process offered by each vendor. The following service providers are included in the 2009 review:
• Brown Brothers Harriman
• Bank of New York/Mellon
• Citi
• iX Partners
• JPMorgan Chase
• Northern Trust
• SS&C
• SEI
• State Street
The Review contains an overview of the industry and its trends, summary results tables for each provider, a glossary, and detailed provider reviews. These detailed reviews are in a common format to allow for comparison among vendors and their providers, and include user comments throught as well in summary form. Because there is no single "best" service provider in the marketplace, providers are not rated. Barrington Partners research can help clients find a good match between their needs and a provider's capabilities and pricing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
The EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre recently announced the appointment of Mr. Ton van Welie, Chief Executive Officer of Ortec Finance, to its international advisory board.
As CEO of Ortec Finance since 2006, Mr. van Welie oversees the daily operations of the company. He has been with Ortec Finance for over fifteen years. Mr. van Welie graduated from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam with an MSc in Econometrics. He has maintained strong links with academia teaching as a guest lecturer, and has published in various professional journals.
The 35 members of the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre international advisory board are responsible for validating the relevance and goals of the research programme proposals presented by the centre's management and for evaluating research outcomes with respect to their potential impact on industry practices.
The EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre and Ortec Finance have created a research chair in Private ALM focused on understanding the application of Asset-Liability Management (ALM) methodology in Private Wealth Management (PWM). The research chair is a three-year research programme piloted by a joint Ortec Finance/EDHEC committee.
