State Street Adds Stress Tests to Risk Dashboard

State Street officials announced today that they have added enhancements to its dashboard to help clients better manage risk and compliance. This is the third major upgrade of the State Street Investment Analytics Dashboard since its introduction in the autumn of 2008.

"One of the key features that our clients are looking for is a consolidated delivery of all their regulatory and investment management needs," Ash Tahbazian, vice president, State Street Investment Analytics, tells Sell-Side Technology. "What the dashboard enables us to do is deliver all the information in an integrated view and provides our clients with a top-level perspective of risk as well as the ability to view their investments from a drill-down perspective to get all the detailed information they need in real time."

This release brings risk analytics to the dashboard as well as provides access to allow clients to model their portfolios and do various stress and scenario testing to "better understand their portfolio dynamics and sources of risk," says a State Street spokesperson. Included are portfolio reallocation tools, expanded investment coverage, new value-at-Risk (VaR) calculation methodologies, "what if" capabilities and heat mapping. The upgrades are delivered to the dashboard online.

State Street took approximately six months to develop the new capabilities, which were based evenly on client feedback and anticipating a demand as new regulations come down the pike, according to William Pryor, senior vice president and head of State Street Investment Analytics.

"Certainly over the last couple years there has been increased regulatory scrutiny on asset managers and asset owners on how they manage the level of risk in their portfolios," he says. "So we wanted to offer our clients different types of risk management tools, such as stress tests and scenario analysis so that they could have transparency on what the potential impact might be on their portfolio based on certain potential changes in the financial and economic markets. We also work very closely with our client advisory board and one of their primary needs was the complete investment picture across the risk-and-return spectrum with depth in each of the asset classes."

Although Pryor says that there are already plans for future upgrades, he declines to go into further detail.