Middle office jobs are fascinating. In performance analysis, spotting dubious returns and tracing them back to questionable inputs requires insight that seems intuitive or innate but results in fact from a keen understanding of markets, asset classes, investment strategies, security characteristics, and portfolio dynamics. Risk management additionally calls for imagination in scenario forecasting, math and programming skills in model development, judgment in prioritizing and mitigating identified risks, and managerial ability in monitoring exposures that continually shift with market movements and the firm’s portfolio decisions. Few careers so completely engage such a wide range of talents.
Less rewarding is handling the voluminous information that feeds the performance measurement system and risk management models. Financial data management is challenging for small banks and investment managers, and it becomes more and more difficult as the business grows organically, adding new accounts, entering new markets, and implementing new strategies that often use derivatives. Not to mention the extreme data integration issues that stem from business combinations!
And data management hasn’t any upside: nobody in your chain of command notices when it’s going well, and everyone reacts when it fails.
Nonetheless, reliable data is vital for informative performance evaluation and effective risk management, especially at the enterprise level. It doesn’t matter how hard it is to collect, format, sort, and reconcile the data from custodians and market data services as well as your firm’s own systems (all too often including spreadsheets) in multiple departments. Without timely, accurate, properly classified information on all the firm’s long and short positions across asset classes, markets, portfolios, issuers, and counterparties, you can’t know where you stand. You can’t answer questions. You can’t do your job.
Adding up the direct, explicit costs of managing data internally is a straightforward exercise; the general ledger keeps track of license fees. The indirect, implicit costs are less transparent. For example, they include the portion of IT, accounting, and administrative salaries and benefits attributable to mapping data to the performance measurement system and the risk models, coding multiple interfaces, maintaining the stress testing environment, correcting security identifiers and input errors—all the time-consuming details that go into supporting the middle office. The indirect costs also include ongoing managerial attention and the potential economic impact of mistakes that are inevitable if your company does not have adequate staffing and well-documented, repeatable, auditable processes in place to support smooth performance measurement and risk management operations.
You can’t delegate responsibility for the integrity of the raw input data provided by your firm’s front office, portfolio assistants, traders, and security accountants. But you can outsource the processing of that data to a proven provider of hosting services. And then your analysts can focus on the things they do best—not managing data but evaluating investment results and enterprise risk.
Learn more about FRG’s Hosting Services here.