Prior to founding Varden, several of our senior consultants were the nucleus of the product team who designed and developed DSTI’s HiPerformance performance measurement and attribution product.  This team was a pioneer in the area of after-tax performance reporting and implemented this functionality commercially several years before government regulations made it a requirement.  We have extensive experience with the many aspects and exception situations of performance that can make the discipline very difficult.  Members of our team have been regular speakers in the industry and are recognized experts in the areas of AIMR and GIPS performance measurement standards. We have experience working with various industry products such as: FactSet, Vestek, Axys, Sylvan, DST’s HiPerformance, and Statpro’s Compass.

Mutual Fund / Performance Reporting Warehouse

As part of a firm-wide technology initiative, a Mutual Fund firm with $30 billion dollars in managed assets wanted to convert their manually intensive, proprietary database of fund data to the firm’s standard Sybase database environment.  Varden provided the analysis, database design, and conversion of 80 years of history. We designed a repeatable process that allowed various data conversions to take place as part of a phased implementation.  In addition to the data conversion, a browser-based reporting environment was designed to allow on-the-fly calculation of various classes of Mutual funds.  Users across the firm are now able to obtain real-time feedback on fund performance from any desktop across the organization.

Web Services for Composite and After-Tax Returns

The Portfolio Managers and Marketing Managers in a large global Investment Management firm required the ability to produce real-time after-tax performance reporting for client reporting and internal use.  Utilizing the Microsoft .Net environment, Varden developed Web Services to calculate the performance results from raw data stored in the firm’s enterprise data warehouse.  The Web Services approach has provided a reusable framework that allows various reporting platforms to leverage this functionality and has allowed seamless integration into the firm’s existing web-based reporting environment.  The XML-based data exchange associated with the application allows the after-tax results to be presented in many different formats and layouts depending upon the specific needs of the client or user.

Web-based, Front-Office Attribution

The Portfolio Managers in a Global Equity environment required detailed attribution analysis on their mutual fund and institutional portfolios.  We designed and managed the development of a solution that gathers data from several data sources and presents ad-hoc attribution reporting in a browser-based environment.  Attribution was provided at the country, industry, and security level and calculated on an absolute or relative basis to industry benchmarks.  The application supports multiple presentation options and results which can be transformed into graphics on a single click.  Drill-down features were also incorporated into the design to allow managers the ability to quickly analyze the data at various levels of detail.