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Portfolio-Manager Workflow: Past to Present
Traders Magazine Online News, November 5, 2018
Portfolio workflow is entering a new era of innovation after being on the sidelines of recent advances in front- and middle-office technology. Partly due to diminished patience with information lag times, portfolio managers are getting better-detailed and more holistic portfolio analytics much more quickly than in the past.
“Ten years ago it was common for the middle office to create and push reports back out to the front office monthly,” said Stan Kwasniewski, Senior Vice President, Senior Director, Strategic Business Unit Operations at FactSet. “Now we’re moving to near real-time delivery of that information. As soon as the middle office can measure and quantify something, they want to get that to the front office.”
Today, portfolio managers see the same data their trader and risk-manager colleagues are seeing, which enables more effective collaboration toward the enterprise-wide goal of generating alpha.
“Portfolio managers are demanding more information, with the perspective of historical analysis,” said Tracy Wolfe, Senior Vice President, Senior Director, Strategy at FactSet. “They’re focused on understanding how the portfolio is changing throughout its life cycle, as opposed to just monitoring the trade life cycle. They are asking ‘How can I consume data in a reconciled, cleansed way, throughout the day?’”
Several decades ago, bringing an investment manager’s front and middle offices together via a harmonized experience of similar technologies, data, and analytics wasn’t a realistic option because the front office as we now know it didn’t exist.
According to a 2017 LinkedIn blog post written by Ryan Chidley, a trader at APG Asset Management, in the 1980s and earlier, portfolio managers often submitted trade orders to brokers directly. PM workflow changed in the 1990s when legal and compliance impetus to centralize interaction with public exchanges and brokers gave rise to the buy-side trading desk.
Chidley outlined the workflow that emerged during that time (at least in equities trading) as follows: the PM decides what to buy or sell, the PM creates a trade order, the order is sent to the buy-side trading desk for execution, and finally, the desk executes the order. This sequence ossified in the 1990s and most of the asset-management industry still uses it more than two decades later.
However, this is changing as institutional trading becomes more strategic, Chidley noted. One underlying change that is facilitating seamless PM workflow is in communication, where meetings and emails are being supplanted by on-demand information procurement.
“We have seen a shift over the past 10 years toward sharing information through digital means—less on a ‘push’ basis and more on a real-time, ‘pull’ basis,” Kwasniewski said. “PMs can log into their front-end interface to get information that traditionally would have been sent to them in an Excel attachment.”
“You’re also starting to see a lot more use of chat systems and natural language reporting, where you’re communicating in the context of the application you’re leveraging, as opposed to sending an email and having a disconnected communication that points you back into an application,” FactSet's Wolfe said.
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