The Challenge
For years, FactSet’s Portfolio Analysis suite empowered users at Causeway Capital Management to view daily exposures, characteristics, performance, attribution, and risk analytics for their portfolios and benchmarks. When the firm sought to reduce its costs per seat for analytics users, it turned to FactSet to acquire a new solution that would continue to leverage FactSet’s best-in-class portfolio analytics. To reduce the cost per seat, while also increasing analytics consumption across the organization, the firm needed a solution that could be easily leveraged by portfolio managers, analysts, traders, client service, and marketing teams.
Causeway also required a platform that could expedite the time it took to calculate analytics and that could seamlessly link with the main source it used for performance calculations.
The Solution
When Causeway reached out to FactSet for guidance on what solution would fit their needs, they were introduced to Portfolio Vault. Portfolio Vault, an extension to FactSet’s Performance and Attribution Solution, allows users to store, validate, and lock performance and attribution data. Within Vault is Portfolio Insight which delivers validated recalculated returns and attribution to a broader audience. The solution was suitable for the firm’s needs because of its cost-effectiveness and ability to expand their analytics consumption across the firm.
With Portfolio Vault and Insight’s compatibility with the firm’s main performance data source, multiple teams at Causeway can align FactSet’s performance calculations with the secondary data to increase the accuracy and speed of data. This has allowed them to keep their official source of performance while leveraging FactSet to expand their distribution of analytics and improve the accuracy, reliability, and economics of the analytics.
The transition from Portfolio Analytics to Portfolio Vault was easy for the firm’s existing FactSet users as they were already familiar with how to navigate around the platform. Therefore, Causeway decided to implement the solution themselves while working with FactSet to train the firm’s users who were unacquainted with the solution.
The Outcome
Seeing how manageable and reliable Portfolio Insight was made Causeway more comfortable with activating FactSet for users who previously didn’t have access to its analytics. The added users can now independently consume reports rather than relying on others in the firm to run reports for them, significantly reducing report latency from days to hours.
The speed, accuracy, and reliability of Vault’s pre-calculated analytics have saved the firm time and ensured accuracy when calculating returns in their main performance data platform. With Vault’s streamlined interface, each team can now easily distribute performance results across the firm through Portfolio Insight and with APIs integrated into FactSet. This allows for a more intuitive experience for the average user.
By converting to Vault, the firm has benefited from an increase in cost savings while adding more seats for portfolio managers, analysts, client service, and marketing members of the firm.
The ease of Portfolio Vault’s implementation has contributed to exceptional results for the firm. This is evident through Causeway’s plans to explore other FactSet products, add more seats, and eventually, convert their automated reporting workflows to be sourced from Vault.
