This is a key element in the scalability value proposition, the largest organisations may be in a position to hire an army of performance operations analysts to ensure the quality of their output, but this is certainly not a luxury smaller firms can bear. While technical scalability is certainly important for smaller managers, operational scalability is absolutely essential to ensure costs are controlled and benefits achieved. Therefore I believe scalability should be a major consideration for all asset managers when selecting a performance solution. But is this true of globalisation?

When we think about globalisation and its impact on performance, we usually focus on large organisations with a global presence spanning several geographic regions. It is interesting to consider the requirements a performance system needs to address in order to achieve an effective ‘global operating model’:

1. Support for multiple locations on one central database/application

2. Support for 24×7 access to the system across all time-zones

3.Allowance for one region to operate unimpeded by other regions operating simultaneously on the same system (e.g. allow processing and calculations to occur in one region, while another is reporting and yet another is loading data, without negative cross region impact)

4. Support data feeds from multiple internal systems across regions

5. Allow data feeds to be processed as each market closes without impacting the other regions

6. Support wide-ranging access control to ensure each region can only view and manage its own book of business, maintaining strict Chinese walls

7. Support comprehensive multi-currency and multi-asset class analysis

When we look at these requirements more closely, we see that the fundamental requirement is to be able to meet the service level agreements (SLAs) of different clients and business lines – which in this instance happen to reside in different regions and time-zones.

However, let’s consider a domestic organisation with several business lines – for a simple example, let’s say they are institutional accounts and private client wealth management. In order to run both books of business on a single system we have to fully address the differing requirements of each business line.

The institutional clients create more revenue and demand more detail (and probably more often), while the private clients bring in less fees on a per account basis and require less detailed analysis, perhaps less frequently. The performance system needs to be able to interface with two back-office systems, produce the results on a priority basis and offer the ability to scale the analysis and reporting based on the value and demands of the client.