GlobalView Sees the Big Picture with APX

Founded in 2006, GlobalView Investments SA is a multi-family office in Geneva, Switzerland. With five employees, the firm oversees approximately $500 million in assets for some 20 high net worth clients.

GlobalView was launched by three partners who had worked in wealth management at a large global bank and decided to go independent. They wanted to get started on the right foot with a portfolio management platform that would enable them to monitor their clients' aggregate holdings at different custodian banks.

Solution

After a review of options, GlobalView selected Advent Portfolio Exchange® (APX), the comprehensive portfolio management solution. APX enables the firm to pursue sophisticated asset allocation strategies, track clients' holdings and generate reports for analysing its exposure and performance.

Benefits

The benefits include:

• Provides aggregate view of holdings
• Allows for a high degree of report customisation
• Provides a means of monitoring asset class and currency exposure and helps determine hedging strategies
• Accommodates rapid growth of account base and assets

When the founders of Geneva-based GlobalView Investments struck out on their own in 2006, they decided to take a different approach to their clients' wealth from conventional asset managers.

Peter Jan Kroon, co-founder and managing partner, said: Basically, what we do is global asset allocation and manager selection on a discretionary basis across multiple banks because our clients typically have at least three banks. We determine what percentage of the client's assets should be in cash, bonds, equities, hedge funds, private equity or real estate. Then we typically farm out each of those asset classes to managers who specialise in them.

With multiple managers and accounts custodied at different banks, GlobalView needed a means of seeing the big picture of its positions.

We're a small multifamily office with just five employees, said Mr Kroon. From the beginning we needed an application that would not only be able to do our client reporting, but also do the account aggregation and help us monitor the positions we have at the various custodian banks.

Knowing their clients were accustomed to the standards and professionalism of a large global bank, the partners were highly selective in their choice of a system. They agreed on Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX), the integrated portfolio management solution built on a SQL server platform.

Mr Kroon said: We looked at a number of different applications and solutions, including outsourcing. We had a list of five or six main criteria that we thought were important and on balance, APX came out ahead of the others.

Customised views

APX allows easy access to portfolio data and gives firms a great deal of flexibility in the way they view data. For GlobalView, APX offers the ability to get an aggregate view of client holdings and positions, monitor asset class and currency exposure, calculate performance and make better informed asset allocation decisions.

APX does a very good job of the aggregation, said Mr Kroon. If we need to make a trade, it makes it easy to see our positions across various banks. We're very comfortable with that aspect of the system.

Compared with the other systems the firm reviewed, one of the key advantages of APX was the ability to have custom reports prepared. Mr Kroon said: For example, if you're managing individual securities in APX, each security can have only one currency label, say euro or dollar. But we are farming out underlying asset classes. We might hire a manager who is doing emerging market equities or somebody who is doing global equities, in which case the underlying currency exposure will be mixed.

One of the reports we have developed enables us to assign multiple currency tags to a single security or holding to show the aggregate currency exposure taking into account the different currency weightings. This allows us to have a much better handle on how we should approach our currency hedging strategy.

APX also helps GlobalView streamline the asset allocation process and make decisions. We've created tags for the different asset classes to allow us to get an accurate picture of a client's consolidated exposure across multiple banks, Mr Kroon said. We also use APX to be sure we understand our underlying exposure. For instance, if we have a number of hedge fund of funds, we want to be sure we do not have an undue concentration in a particular strategy, or even particular managers.

So we have created a report where we identify the top ten underlying strategies and individual managers within each hedge fund of funds, and we can monitor our exposure.

GlobalView is using APX's reporting capabilities primarily for the firm's own internal analysis, exposure management and decision making. One prime example, according to Mr Kroon, is measuring performance. Over here, not all banks provide performance calculation, he said. APX allows us to apply one consistent performance methodology - TWR - across all banks of a client.

Off to a fast start

As a small start-up firm with no legacy system and comparatively few accounts, GlobalView found it easy to get up and running on APX.

It was fairly straightforward, said Mr Kroon. Getting set up was very manageable. It took probably four to six weeks to get the very basics and get comfortable. We did get some training, and obviously we needed help in the beginning, with how you set up a corporate bond that pays bi-annually or annually, for example. But actually we were able to set up portfolios and create a lot of securities ourselves. We had very good support here locally in Geneva from Advent.

After a year with APX, GlobalView is seeing that the system still has considerable potential for the firm. I'd say we have spent the first year getting to know the system reasonably well, Mr Kroon said.

Accommodating rapid growth

With APX, GlobalView was well prepared for something it did not expect: rapid growth of assets and clients. It's been interesting from a marketing and new business perspective, said Mr Kroon. Most of the clients that initially joined us knew us from our days at our previous bank, and now they have seen that we have made the transition to being independent successfully.

We thought maybe in two or three years they might ask us to manage additional assets that they had somewhere else. Well, our clients are bringing us additional business a lot quicker than we ever expected, so we're really glad we have the aggregation capability with APX. Otherwise we wouldn't have a good handle on our asset class exposure, currency exposure or tracking accounts at multiple banks.

APX has helped GlobalView establish itself in a relatively short time as an independent investment advisor with a distinctive approach. Clearly APX is not a 'one-size-fits-all' solution, but rather one that can be tailored to a firm's unique needs and style.

Mr Kroon said: APX gives us quite a bit of flexibility in developing our own reports and the way we can look at our portfolios. On balance, we are happy with our decision.

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