BENELUX- Fortis Investment Bank and software provider Strategic Asset Management Solutions (SAMS) have launched a joint venture offering Benelux clients bespoke performance attribution, risk measurement and analysis.

Under the new venture, Institutional clients will be offered more detailed analysis than the standard custody reporting. Data from Fortis’s custodied assets of e400bn is passed onto SAMS who analyses it with a system known as Socrates and turns it into performance attribution and risk analysis reports.

In addition to being a software provider, SAMS has a consulting division of around twenty able to work with trustees and pension fund managers in explaining the reports. The service comes at a fixed fee on a portfolio basis rather than being oriented around basis points.

Some institutions and large pension funds buy the software off SAMS and do the analysis in house. But under the joint venture, clients will receive reports that analyse but are not prescriptive. “This is a service that we are offering opposed to the software itself,” says SAMS managing director Michael Harriman.

Fortis says the venture will produce reports that go right down to individual trades and that, as such, it will be possible to execute detailed analysis of risk, performance and the cost of brokers.

Clayton Heijman, chief commercial officer at Fortis Information Bank says many pension funds managers on the continent realise that their existing analysis of risk and performance are probably no longer sufficient. “The climate is rougher and institutions need more detailed reporting,” he says.

Fortis considered building its own system from scratch but dismissed the idea as too expensive and time consuming.

Earlier this month the Royal Bank of Canada's investment analytics arm, the Benchmark(TM) group, announced a strategic alliance with the financial analytics and technology firm RiskMetrics.

The result of this alliance will be an integrated risk analytics and management product for RBC Global Services' institutional clients. The product, Benchmark(TM) Risk Management, adds to RBC Global Services' existing Benchmark range of analytical products and services for institutional investors.

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