Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Performance Measurement and Attribution Product—BISAM

Producing good, consistent returns is one thing, but providing empirical and repeatable evidence with respect to how, where and why that performance was attained is another. These functions have been BISAM's bread and butter since its days as a largely local service provider, headquartered in Paris and operating almost exclusively in the French asset management industry.

But that started to change shortly after the firm won its first Buy-Side Technology Award back in 2008, and what the market has witnessed over the course of the last decade is the emergence and maturation of a top-flight technology provider with well-established European, North American and now Asian operations. And so, for the ninth straight year, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with the BST Awards that BISAM has been adjudged the premier provider of buy-side performance measurement and attribution services, thanks to its flagship B-One offering, which has evolved over the years into the industry's benchmark in this category.

B-One is a performance, attribution, risk and reporting platform, designed to streamline investment processes by integrating middle- and back-office systems. It uses a single data source across all of its modules in order to help improve clients' performance measurement, data management, operational risk and attribution, client reporting, and composite management and GIPS-compliance activities.

As Waters has reported repeatedly over the years, performance and attribution specialists have sought to integrate and align risk and performance functionality in a single platform in order to provide users with risk factor-based allocation support so that they can analyze risk and performance simultaneously. It’s all about measuring the impact of risk management on performance on an ex-post basis and then applying that knowledge to future risk strategies on an ex-ante basis. In March this year, BISAM made the astute acquisition of FinAnalytica, which delivered what it had sought for some time: a risk management platform in Cognity that could sit alongside B-One and provide users with a unified risk and performance offering. 

BISAM’s plans going forward are two-fold: phase one in the fourth quarter of this year involves the single implementation for performance and risk analytics to standardize data quality, the production of integrated analytics, and the delivery of static reports; while in phase two next year, it will support integrated performance and risk results in a single view, including dynamic drill-down for an holistic view of performance and risk across all funds. 

For the ninth straight year, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with the BST Awards that BISAM has been adjudged the premier provider of buy-side performance measurement and attribution services, thanks to its flagship B-One offering, which has evolved over the years into the industry’s benchmark in this category.