Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Newcomer (Vendor or Product)—StatPro Revolution

StatPro’s Revolution product is adjudged the best newcomer over the last 12 months, joining Derivative Fitch’s RAP CD, Weeden and Co’s Pragma, Alphacet’s Discovery, and Knight Direct’s Oasis offerings in the winners' circle. Since the inception of the Buy-Side Technology Awards, this category has proven to be the most competitive, and this year was no exception with no fewer than 18 entries.

According to the Wimbledon, UK-based performance, risk and portfolio analysis technology provider, StatPro’s Revolution started as an incubator project in late 2007, before entering development in 2008. It has since grown into a single version, multi-tenant portfolio analysis system, offering online access to performance attribution and various risk measures that can be fully deployed in a matter of minutes. Justin Wheatley, StatPro’s Luxembourg-based founder and CEO, who traveled to London to attend the awards luncheon, says StatPro sees its future in the cloud. Because Revolution is an online-only platform, it is accessible via a browser, literally from anywhere; there is no costly implementation process—in fact there is no implementation in the traditional sense whatsoever—and users can make a start immediately. StatPro explains that data management is the key to its minimum-of-fuss model; Revolution already has significant market data—over 500,000 assets and literally thousands of benchmarks—“pre-populated” within the platform.

The platform allows users to calculate the following measures and view the analysis in online dashboards: portfolio-, segment- and security-level performance, calculated over standard periods or between custom dates; over 200 different statistics that can be viewed and charted showing trends over time; geometric and arithmetic equity attribution to segment level, showing allocation and selection effects (also charting attribution trends over time); portfolio-allocation analysis showing absolute and relative allocation, (also charting allocation trends at segment level over time); portfolio-, segment- and security-level Value-at-Risk (VaR), calculated using an historical simulation model, showing expected distribution of returns using configurable confidence levels and holding periods; and risk scenarios showing portfolio-, segment- and security-level impacts of 10 scenarios.

Revolution runs in an SSAE16-certified datacenter with SSAE16-certified management processes operated by StatPro. The system was designed with a highly scalable architecture to allow for tens of thousands of users and portfolios. A custom broker service distributes jobs to any number of engine servers that feed results databases ready for the web interface layer to display to the user. The Revolution front-end components are deployed on over 60,000 internet servers around the world using the Akamai content delivery network, which greatly increases the speed of the site for end-users in any location. —VBA