Simplifying Portfolio Analysis: Save Time Through Automation

In the first article in our series, we addressed how to prioritize the work you want to simplify. In the second article, we addressed how to simplify your workflow. In this fourth article, we turn to how to automate your work. We continue to develop our worked example to better illustrate our method.

Once you have simplified and standardized your workflow, look for opportunities to automate steps in the process by creating reusable processes and assets. Examples include custom benchmarks that can be reused across different analytical scenarios and portfolios; performance-management processes that teams can use to hold fund managers to task; portfolio risk and performance measures and their associated visualization tools; and design templates for factsheets, regulatory documents and marketing communications. Set up your automation in your tools, and share them across teams.

A wealth manager’s home office investment team analyzes the work they are doing. They discover that they spend 40% of their time customizing model portfolios on behalf of branch advisers. The team prioritizes this as work they want to simplify and automate, writes down the tasks they perform when customizing models, and identifies several opportunities to improve their workflow. This includes consolidating their work into a single portfolio-management application.

Now that they have consolidated their workflow into one application, the home office investment team uses the application’s analytical capabilities to build a normalized and comprehensive set of performance, risk and scenario-planning analytical measures that they can reuse across many different tasks and workflows. They also use the exact same set of analytical measures to generate data and charts for the factsheets and marketing communications the team creates. This ensures consistency between how the team makes performance decisions and reports on them, and removes further rework.

The team also uses their portfolio-management application to create a library of standardized templates for internal reports, compliance reporting and marketing communications, ensuring that each template integrates the firm’s visual brand language correctly. The team integrates their analytical models directly into the branded templates, automating the population of templates with data and charts using the portfolio-management application.

With all templates pre-approved by both marketing and compliance departments, the team is able to shorten their end-to-end cycle times from weeks to days and hours.