Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Portfolio Accounting Platform—Advent Geneva

Of the many hedge funds that Waters has written about over the past year, the vast majority are tapped into Advent Geneva. This is probably as good a sign as any to describe Advent’s dominance in this category, as it has won this award every year since 2007.

In May, Advent released Geneva 8.5. The vendor added: enhanced real-time profit-and-loss (P&L) and exposure views; simplified usability; increased data access for reporting; private equity support; n-Tier fund structure support to manage multi-tiered fund structures; and fully integrated investment and investor accounting support on a single platform.

Geneva’s configurable dashboards have also been combined with a new Bloomberg interface that provides up-to-the-second market data. Given all these tweaks to the Geneva platform, it is no surprise that over the last 18 months Advent has grown its client base by 18 percent. These additions, coupled with what is an already robust system, allows users to get out-of-the-box views into P&L, performance, exposure, and forecasting for a consolidated view of P&L and exposure, as well as single-step error correction.

The system’s report-designer tools allow “non-technical” users to create their own dashboards and reports so that firms can customize them for the look and feel that fits their needs. According to Advent, “custom start pages, bookmarks, dashboards, and reports can be configured based on specific roles within buy-side firms, and redesigned at any time, making workflows more efficient—all without the need for IT assistance.”

For reporting, Geneva leverages Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which includes more than 150 reports. According to the company, clients can automate the process of generating and distributing reports via subscriptions; drill down and through data views; reproduce any report at any time, even if the data has changed; and report on positions, P&L and performance across multiple levels, including fund, strategy, industry, and counterparty.

Despite the fact that Advent has been a titan in the field of portfolio accounting, the firm has continued to stay ahead of the curve even as Dodd–Frank in the US and the review of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) in Europe continue to take shape. It’s this leadership mentality that has kept Advent at the top. —AM