InvestTech Systems Consulting, Inc., the leading Investment Technology and Investment Operations consulting firm for institutional investment managers, announced the successful integration of FactSet’s Portfolio Analysis system and Thomson Reuter’s PORTIA for a New York-based global investment management firm.
As many investment management firms move to transaction-based performance measurement, they are challenged with integrating the complex daily files containing security level information, ending market value, net purchases, net sales, income, accruals, and management fees. Middleware is often employed to manipulate the accounting system extract and prepare it for the performance measurement system. However, because this firm did not have a middleware solution, InvestTech was asked to integrate the systems without it. With InvestTech’s years of integration experience and knowledge of the PORTIA report writer, the InvestTech consultants were able to produce the required file without the use of middleware. This was accomplished by developing a list of PORTIA holdings and transactions reports, and generating the output from the series of reports seamlessly to one file. Jill Katz, InvestTech Managing Director, explained, “The ability to create complicated nested calculations within the PORTIA report writer enabled us to produce the complex integration file. This integration enabled our client to easily integrate the two systems without having a third system involved, saving the company hours of additional work and the cost of additional software.”
InvestTech has subsequently assisted another investment management client with the integration between FactSet’s Portfolio Analysis holdings-based returns and Eagle Investment Systems PACE data management application. Ms. Katz added, “The second integration project took less time than the first as we have deepened our working knowledge of FactSet. We were able to leverage that knowledge to streamline the effort required for the integration work.”
InvestTech has experienced an increase in the number of investment management firms replacing in-house developed performance measurement and attribution systems with vendor-provided solutions. InvestTech’s expertise within the performance attribution space includes optimized business processes, system evaluation and selection, and implementation and integration, involving industry leading vendors including FactSet, Eagle, BI-SAM, SS&C, Barra, StatPro, CAPS, DSTi, Thomson, and Wilshire.
