There is no shortage of challenges or opportunities facing the investment industry today. To thrive in this environment, firms must be agile, able to quickly adapt to market shifts and seize emerging opportunities.
One key to achieving this agility is expanding firm capabilities with cutting-edge partner technology platforms that allow the firm to create its own investment ecosystem.
Modern investment ecosystems, built with cloud, microservices, and API technology, enable firms to seamlessly tie together workflows across more systems and best-of-breed partner solutions. This ability to tap into tools from innovative partners certified by an existing technology provider – some with the simple touch of a button – accelerates time-to-market, reduces costs, and mitigates risk.
As the head of partnerships for SS&C’s Eze technology offerings, I've witnessed firsthand the transformative impact partner ecosystems can have for firms. In this blog, I'll explore eight ways your firm can leverage SS&C partner solutions to enhance performance reporting and attribution, transaction cost analysis, regulatory reporting, and more.
Performance Reporting & Attribution
To justify fees in today's competitive market environment, investment managers must be able to effectively communicate with clients about their investment strategies and outcomes.
Performance reporting and attribution tools help managers understand the true drivers of portfolio performance, compare to benchmarks, and illustrate these results to clients.
By providing deep insights into portfolio performance, these tools foster transparency, build investor trust, and empower managers to optimize investment strategies for superior returns.
SS&C partners offer a comprehensive suite of performance attribution solutions, covering standard metrics like alpha, beta, correlations, and benchmark comparisons. They also enable detailed breakdowns by strategy and analyst, providing granular insights for informed decision-making. Additionally, they offer custom investor reporting to meet unique needs.
Ex-ante & Ex-post Risk
Ex-ante and ex-post risk are essential for firms to gain a holistic understanding of investment risk. By effectively managing both risk measures, investment managers can anticipate potential losses, make proactive portfolio adjustments, evaluate performance, establish the accuracy of risk models, and refine future projections.
Through partner solutions accessible directly within their Eze tools, users can access fully dynamic risk monitoring tied to trade and position data as well as what-if analysis. Whether a firm is looking at forecasted or realized risk, Eze Marketplace has a solution for active risk-management strategies.
Factor Analysis
One of the primary challenges of a portfolio manager is ensuring every dollar of capital is directed toward the highest sources of return. To do this effectively, they need to identify and isolate the underlying drivers of returns.
Factor analysis can help determine true alpha-generating activities and minimize unintended risk exposures, ensuring that investment decisions are both informed and impactful.
Through Eze Marketplace, factor-focused investment firms can access robust solutions to identify, measure, and manage factor exposures. Our partners offer both standardized and customized factor models, empowering managers to construct portfolios aligned with their specific investment objectives.
Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA)
The true impact of trading costs on portfolio performance is too often overlooked. In today's competitive and fee-conscious investment landscape, it is critical for investment managers to know if and when they are trading efficiently.
Fortunately, TCA tools can help detect inefficiencies and identify cost-effective execution venues, as well as enable firms to optimize trading strategies, negotiate better deals with brokers, and enhance net returns for clients.
Eze technology users can benefit from in-platform access to partners offering unique real-time TCA, interactive and actionable analytics, flexible reporting, and – coming soon – pre-trade workflows.
Regulatory Reporting
With evolving and increasing industry regulations, it can be hard to keep up.
However, adherence to accurate and timely regulatory reporting is paramount for investment managers working with today's transparency-oriented investors. Doing so protects client interests, safeguards the firm's reputation, and prevents financial and legal penalties.
Eze reporting partners have extensive expertise and have advised major regulatory bodies globally. With these tools, firms can automate and outsource regulatory reporting processes, freeing up time to dig deeper into key differentiators and alpha-generating opportunities.
Trade Surveillance
By employing advanced analytics and algorithms to examine vast amounts of trading data, trade surveillance technology enables the timely identification of potential market abuse, insider trading, or other misconduct.
For example, insider trading algorithms may monitor price spikes between the execution price of a trade and the price movement of the instrument to identify out-of-the-ordinary behavior.
Eze Marketplace offers trade surveillance solutions designed to help firms foster investor trust, contribute to fair and orderly markets, and protect against market manipulation, fraud, and suspicious activity.
Securities Class Action Filing
With the current level of outstanding securities settlements, firms stand to gain significant net proceeds through the recovery process. However, managing the class action filing process can be time-consuming and laborious.
To streamline this process and maximize recoveries, firms can leverage specialized tools to efficiently identify and compute claims losses. By automating these tasks, firms can reduce operational overhead and allocate resources to more strategic initiatives.
Eze partners with industry experts in processing settlement claims in connection with securities, interest rate derivatives, antitrust, collective action filings, and settlement distributions, helping to maximize firms’ operational alpha.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In a recent episode of the “Tech It Up” podcast, Frank Matarese, managing director of product management for SS&C Eze, shared that he sees technologies like AI and machine learning as being where the cloud was ten years ago – technology firms are initially hesitant about, but that will only continue to gain importance and popularity as the industry figures out how best to use it.
He sees the value of AI not so much in “picking stocks” but in helping firms crunch an ever-increasing data volume, enabling staff to digest the data that matters most to them more quickly.
AI investment technology already on the market offers firms the opportunity to enhance operations, make data-driven decisions faster, identify new opportunities, and manage risks more effectively.
As the industry navigates these early days of AI financial solutions, Eze is ahead of the curve with AI partner solutions for portfolio optimization, market intelligence, and ESG analysis.
To see any of these tools in action or to learn how leveraging SS&C partner solutions can help your firm navigate the challenges and opportunities of today’s markets with agility, reach out.
