BST Awards 2020: Best Performance Measurement—SS&C Technologies

SS&C Technologies has claimed the best performance measurement and attribution product to the buy side award, unseating StatPro, which had won the category the previous two years.

The product, called Sylvan, streamlines the calculation and reporting of performance while enabling users to analyze the sources of return, and supports multiple attribution methodologies, customized benchmarking, and composite management.

Mark Elliott, director of performance measurement solutions, narrows down his clients’ challenges that Sylvan helps to solve into three buckets. First, they need analyses that match their unique investment processes. This is helped by Sylvan’s user-defined attribution capabilities and 20-plus out-of-the-box methodologies, which allow clients to both pick and create methodologies.

The second challenge is data validation and workflow, which ensure that clients can be confident in the results and that analyses are accurate and timely. To meet that goal, SS&C has provided tools that allow for exception-based workflows, using automated data validation processes.

And lastly, there should be easy access to performance analysis throughout an organization. Historically, the performance team produced results and then distributed them to interested parties within the business. Sylvan’s new dashboards and customizable reporting provides self-serve access freeing up time for analysts to examine performance instead of producing reports and circulating them.

“We have added significant new dashboarding capabilities for both portfolio and composite analysis.  These features give users overviews of their performance and allow them to drill into the details intuitively,” Elliott says.

The next 12 months will see a strong focus on R&D, and significant enhancements in ex-post risk reporting and analysis, and improved functionality in managing blended and custom benchmarks.  Additionally, SS&C will continue to enhance its dashboarding and reporting capabilities.

The firm is also seeing rising interest from wealth managers, who may soon rank among the massive insurance companies, pension funds, and hedge funds that make up the company’s client base.