AFTAs 2018: Best Global Deployment—JP Morgan Asset Management

JP Morgan Asset Management (JP Morgan AM) wins the best global deployment category in this year’s AFTAs, thanks to the rollout of its Global Equities Toolkit (GET), a platform designed to support the portfolio research and quantitative analysis functions underpinning the firm’s portfolio construction activities. The New York-headquartered asset manager’s Global Equities Research business manages more than $500 billion and is pivotal to the firm across a range of regional and cross-border equity investment strategies. GET provides a single point of access to real-time market data and sentiments with a range of embedded analytics supporting functionality for a large number of investment strategies and a set of reports and dashboards. It supports nearly 3,000 researched securities and features 20+ applications and a range of user tools, providing users with faster and more accurate fundamental and quant analysis. These include specific portfolio analytics, construction and management, alpha risk-modeling, back-testing and performance-monitoring applications with overlapping functionality. 

GET’s global deployment required the firm to map out different asset manager and analyst needs for supporting strategies, investment styles and thousands of securities that are traded on multiple markets, in multiple time zones and currencies. GET combines natural-language processing technology with more than 30 years of historical data, including micro- and macro-economic data from across the industry, and is used by the firm’s portfolio managers, research and portfolio analysts, and global sector specialists, as well as external client portfolio managers. Each visualization and function was built as a reusable module, allowing individual users from different investment desks to build their own individualized dashboards, enabling the business to be faster and more agile when it comes to rebalancing portfolios, hedging or taking positions in covered equity securities. JP Morgan AM estimates that folding the applications and user tools into the GET platform has resulted in cost efficiencies exceeding 30 percent.  

The deployment of GET has helped it to reduce its number of ad-hoc tools, while streamlining system access and minimizing the risks associated with manual data management. It describes GET as a “noteworthy technology leap forward, removing dependencies on legacy applications/systems and user tools,” and is based on the latest JP Morgan enterprise-wide technologies, HTML 5 and REST for the user interfaces and micro-services/cloud-based services supporting scalability, while machine learning-based modules are being added to the platform incrementally as the firm looks to leverage the significant potential artificial intelligence holds for the asset management industry.

Past winners of this category include State Street (2014), Nomura Securities (2015) and Northern Trust (2016).