Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Client-Reporting Platform—Equipos

Since the downturn of 2008, client reporting has become one of the most critical business functions for buy-side firms to manage as a result of increased investor demand. Whereas in the past, during the halcyon years of the early 2000s, investors tended not to mind too much if their reports were somewhat irregular in their production and vague in their content—just as long as the double-digit returns continued. But all that started to change at the back end of 2007 when returns dried up and investors started demanding greater reporting granularity and regularity, pressuring buy-side firms into upping their game. At the time, Investit’s Catherine Doherty, one of the original BST Awards panelists, summed up the situation perfectly: “If investors are rattled by market conditions, they’re more likely to leave because of a servicing problem. But if a [fund] manager can explain that a product is doing what it always said it would do in these market conditions, then the client is more likely to stay,” she reasoned.

This year’s best client-reporting product—a category won in the past by Advent Software (2007 and 2008) and Vermilion Software (2009 and 2010)—marks a first win for Equipos, the London-based buy-side and sell-side client-reporting solutions provider, founded in 1999 by investment reporting experts Damian Bryan and David Broadfield.

Coric, the firm’s flagship client-reporting offering, supports client-reporting functions with unlimited scalability, full-functionality document management, and sophisticated business-user-definable workflows and layouts. It is designed to be implemented as a standalone, in-house buy-side reporting suite or as a multi-tenant platform for third-party administrators. A cursory glance down the company's substantial client list reveals the depth of its UK buy-side penetration—many of the firm’s impressive UK users represent the cream of the UK buy-side crop. The firm’s North American market is significantly more modest, consisting of only a handful of clients, although all of them qualify for “bulge-bracket” status.

The Coric platform features robust, standards-based technology for enterprise-wide deployment; its flexibility means that data from any source can be easily accessed and managed; it boasts a proprietary rendering engine that delivers speed and scalability—one UK-based client, for example, processes 40,000 20-page reports overnight; it offers an easy-to-use layout builder; and its client-services users can use its Microsoft Office-like functionality to create and customize personalized reports without IT involvement. —VBA