BST Awards 2019: Best performance measurement and attribution product—StatPro

For the second straight year, StatPro has been named as having the best performance measurement and attribution product. But while there’s stability in StatPro’s offering, it’s a time of great change for the vendor. On October 29, Pittsburgh-based Confluence Technologies, a US-based provider of automation software for investment managers, acquired StatPro for £161.1 million (more than $207 million) in cash.

Negative rates and the success of passive strategies are compressing margins for traditional investment strategies. As a result, buy-side firms are forced to be more innovative, venturing into new investment processes or proving with greater evidence the added value provided by their insights and strategies. The breadth of analyses required to support these growing needs is expanding, along with the need for integrating analytics into a single digital platform to become more efficient and reduce cost of ownership, which led Confluence to snap up StatPro.

StatPro Revolution, the company’s flagship, cloud-based platform, provides fixed-income attribution, configurable dashboards, and it is expanding its performance book of record, such as by allowing multiple periodic sets of results to be calculated and exported in bulk at the very earliest points within the performance measurement process.

StatPro has worked to build out its capabilities around processing large volumes of data to prepare daily extract/distribution reports of performance information to various internal and external stakeholders. On the fixed-income attribution side, the vendor has worked to expand its offering for the usage of multiple data sources for risk analytics and yield-curve data. The vendor has also added a new fixed-income attribution model that allows interest-rate bets to be split from spread allocation bets, while also providing the user with the choice of two new spread allocation methods for the decomposition of spread effects.

Backed by private equity firm TA Associates, Confluence will take London Stock Exchange-listed StatPro private.