BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Performance Measurement and Attribution Product—StatPro

The buy side is driven largely by performance. Each asset manager’s livelihood, therefore, depends on its ability to evidence its returns through accurate and sophisticated performance measurement and attribution tools, an ever more important task since the introduction of best execution requirements under the revised Markets and Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), which came into force on January 3 this year. 

In previous years, this category was dominated by BISAM, now part of FactSet, but this year London-based StatPro takes center stage at the Buy-Side Technology Awards, thanks to its Revolution offering, a cloud-based performance and risk platform. StatPro also won the best buy-side risk management initiative over the last 12 months, thanks to the inclusion of its Risk Driver Decomposition functionality within Revolution (see page 60). 

StatPro has been hard at work over the course of the last 12 months extending Revolution’s functionality, including support for tiered and untiered fee structures, fund look-throughs (including funds, benchmarks and exchange-traded funds), aggregate portfolios, fixed-income attribution, and after-tax returns, mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investment Company Act of 1940. Ian Thompson, global director of portfolio analytics at StatPro, explains that this year the firm also redesigned Revolution’s front-end graphics and incorporated customizable dashboards to enhance the platform’s user experience. He adds that one of StatPro’s 2018 objectives was to strengthen Revolution’s workflow capabilities to enable buy-side clients to manage their performance and attribution data in a more effective, efficient and transparent way.

It is no secret that the provider has spent years developing its cloud-native infrastructure from the ground up, partnering with third-party providers such as Amazon and Microsoft along the way. Being a cloud-based service allows StatPro to scale its business and effectively manage any increases in activity on the platform if and when it arises. “This auto-scalability is the elasticity that allows additional services to be fired up, almost instantly, to enable the processing of any increased volumes according to the agreed service windows,” explains Thompson. “For example, if a specific client wants all their portfolios processed within say, one hour, we can set up the software to make sure that all performance calculations will process in that timeframe.”

The move to a cloud model has also allowed the firm to roll out software versions of the platform at a steady cadence, providing clients with access to the latest updates on a fortnightly basis. 

Looking forward, StatPro will look to further enhance its customized dashboards and extend its support of fixed-income attribution.