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StatPro rolls out public beta of Revolution portfolio analytics software

StatPro Revolution, a portfolio analytics program, is now available in public beta. The software could find a…

StatPro Revolution, a portfolio analytics program, is now available in public beta.
The software could find a place in the toolkit of registered investment advisers, a market that thanks to its growth is of interest to StatPro.
Revolution is turn-key software as a service application that provides access to market data, portfolio analysis and reporting with a difference from many competitors in that it is delivered with integrated data and analytics.
Such a single-point approach is meant to provide more consistency in analysis when compared to multi-system solutions, especially those composed of different vendors.
With the public beta advisers have access to allocation, attribution, performance and risk analysis.
Over 500,000 securities and 11,000 benchmarks are available allowing instant portfolio analysis by importing simple holdings data.
StatPro is an international company with its corporate HQ in the UK. I’ve been following the globalization of software for many years now and the notion of cross-pollination across industry segments and international boundaries continues to fascinate me.
Whether it is as simple as refreshing new design concepts for staid product lines (ala the Finantix financial planning application for iPad) or simply how much easier it is to build things using open source software and web services as a delivery mechanism — or in this case takes core analytical engines perfected over years of use in enterprise environments and modifies them for different types of users.
The fact is that such innovation results in more choice and often greater breadth of features available in the market place.
I had a good conversation recently with Mark Bramley, chief executive of StatPro North America.
I felt him cringe while saying this but it is apt: “Here is a fairly tortured analogy to cars; too much of our industry has spent its time building Formula One cars, especially in the hedge fund space,” he said, adding,
“I’m not going to name a car but we are trying to make this a more affordable opportunity, with pricing based on usage that will be affordable for the small asset manager right through to very high-end asset managers.”
He pointed out that the small- and mid-sized organizations within the industry have been neglected over the years in favor of selling to large enterprises that could afford to pay big licensing and maintenance fees.
While StatPro started out life in that category as an expert systems provider to the largest asset managers (it currently counts 14 of the 20 largest asset managers in the world as customers with a total of 250 clients worldwide), with Revolution Bramley contends that the company is evolving to “meet those guys in the middle.”
“In the beginning we were just supplying the engine and telling the client where to go to buy the oil, the oil in this case being the data, but four years ago we started to add data to our analytics and provide more transparency in terms of where the data came from,” he said.
He explained that the while the company’s customer base had started out almost exclusively with intermediaries and in the back office, as the products have become more turnkey the audience has broadened and StatePro has become a supplier of data and analytics more along the lines of the “Bloombergs, Thomson Reuters, FactSets,* and IDCs of the world” (*FactSet Research Systems Inc., in case, like me, you had not heard of them).
The new Revolution product combines both open source and proprietary technology and requires only a list of daily positions be input by advisers. Their software provides everything else.
Revolution will be priced at $100 per portfolio per month.
The full launch of StatPro Revolution is scheduled for January 2011.
See our accompanying brief slideshow (at left) for a few screenshots of the interface.
For more information visit StatPro online.
On a side note: An interesting open source organization worth checking out that StatPro is a backer of is QuantLib.org, a free/open-source library for quantitative finance.