A major division of a global investment bank provides capital to traditional and alternative asset management organizations for a wide variety of tasks including liquidity, buyouts, recapitalization, acquisitions and the introduction of new products and channels. The bank assumes risk without taking ownership. In exchange, the bank receives revenue sharing interest against future gains.

With this arrangement, asset management organizations can effectively avoid many of the disruptions and pitfalls that traditionally accompany a search for liquidity, allowing them to focus on performance, brand building and franchise value.

The bank’s business model requires vigorous and complex risk analytics across a $1 billion portfolio consisting of funds, fund of funds, private equity, institutional investment banks and traditional asset managers. A key challenge the bank faced was consolidating gigabytes of data from disparate client asset management systems that included CRM, document management and quantitative business intelligence information. The data needed to be normalized, searchable and easily accessible by non-technical end users using Excel as their primary analytical tool.

ProViz developed an extensible platform using a suite of Microsoft technologies to create a collaborative environment with a consolidated data repository as its core. Using new file handling features available in Microsoft SQL, structured and unstructured data from over twenty disparate client systems is automatically logged into a central repository where it is accessible for proprietary and third-party risk scenarios.

In order to accommodate non-technical users, ProViz designed a self-service business intelligence front end using familiar, easy-to-use Excel as an interface. Analysts can perform a wide variety of modeling scenarios including regression analysis, Monte Carlo, discounted cash flow and cash flow projections using Excel. Additionally, large clusters of data from disparate sources can be moved into a desktop data mart for “what if” scenarios using the self service tool.

Completed reports can be automatically generated on a preplanned or ad hoc basis for group collaboration. Everyone on the team including analysts, risk managers, researchers, dealers, and senior executives can view and modify reports in real time using SharePoint, which provides complete Excel functionality in a browser. Moreover, since all the data is stored in standard document libraries it is easily searchable.