StatPro enters fixed income space

LONDON – StatPro, the Wimbledon, UK-based provider of investment management technology has unveiled a fixed income attribution platform, dubbed StatPro Fixed Income Attribution System (SFI).

Mathieu Cubilie, SFI's product manager based in StatPro's Paris office, says the vendor has already signed seven buy-side clients to the offering, including the CN Pension Fund (the Canada National Railways Pension Trust Funds), Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust in London, and Groupama Asset Management, the asset management arm of French mutual insurance group Groupama, with more than E50 billion under management.

None of the clients are currently in production with SFI – 'ideal' implementations take a minimum of three months for up to 10 portfolios, explains Cubilie. "When it comes to implementations, the size of the portfolios don't matter much. What matters is the complexity of the instruments within those portfolios because part of the flexibility we have in the system comes from the fact that we try to understand each instrument individually," he says.

It is no secret that this is one of the most keenly contested technology spaces on the buy side – FMC, SunGard, CAfIT, Princeton Financial and DSTi are just a few of the vendors with products serving the market. According to Cubilie, the key to StatPro's offering is its flexibility, which he says allows the user to replicate the "management process" within the system. "You can't have a global answer in terms of fixed-income attribution if your system only uses a single attribution model," he says. "To address this we have several models available, which allow the user to choose the model that most accurately reflects how he manages the portfolio."

SFI is an ex-post application and therefore does not offer 'what if' analysis, although Cubilie says that when Foreign & Colonial goes live, portfolio managers will be able to track their attribution on a daily basis.