BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side portfolio analysis tool—Style Analytics

For the second straight year it’s Style Analytics taking home the best portfolio analysis tool award.

As more data becomes available—or at least becomes easier and cheaper to corral—analytics tools are increasingly important for asset managers, asset owners and consultants. The managers want to differentiate their funds from their competitors, while asset owners and consultants want to evaluate managers against each other to determine which ones fit best with their mandates, says Damian Handzy, chief commercial officer for Style. “Additionally, fee pressures make this manager differentiation even more important for all parties, especially with the growth of passive investing,” he says.

As an example of the uniqueness of Style Analytics’ offering, it provides fully transparent factor analysis on each environmental, social and governance (ESG) portfolio, showing how each portfolio compares to a custom peer group in terms of individual factors like book-to-price (a value factor) and return-on-equity (a quality factor). “We’ve just launched a full suite of ESG factor analyses that presents ESG and fundamental factors side-by-side for a full view of how a portfolio is positioned,” Handzy says. “So their challenges are differentiation, fee pressure, ESG investing, and manager selection. We help with all of those topics.”

Most recently, Style added eVestment holdings data to complement the Morningstar holdings data in Style’s Peer Insight product, which allows users to create custom peer groups and then evaluate individual funds to those peer groups and to other funds. Individual managers use the tool to identify close competitors and differentiating characteristics of their own funds, while asset owners and consultants use the same tool to evaluate funds for investment consideration. “Clients now have access to all the funds monitored by both eVestment and Morningstar,” Handzy says.

The vendor has also partnered with Sustainalytics to offer a full suite of ESG capabilities, including guideline monitoring, ESG risk profiling, and rebalancing what-if analysis on ESG and factor exposures.