Fischer Francis Develops Online Access of Portfolio Data For Fund Managers

Fischer Francis Trees and Watts has spent the past couple of months creating a data warehouse and affiliated analytical applications that will allow its asset managers to access portfolio data from a standard Web browser. The New York-based money manager with about $31 billion in assets, had to deal with reconciling two different portfolio accounting systems, a BEA-designed system for its domestic portfolios and ITS Associates' PMIS for its international accounts, as well as replace the many disparate analytical applications that the firm had come to develop over time.

"Until recently, client investments would be in either one accounting system or the other," explains Geoffrey Blaisdell, chief technology officer. "The investment styles of the different types of portfolios were somewhat distinct, with our international accounts run out of our London office and domestic accounts out of New York. In many ways, they were run as two separate businesses, but because investment styles have changed over the last couple of years, with investors wanting more global exposure, we needed a way to bring the data and investment procedures together."

Before setting up the data warehouse, Blaisdell says the firm established four goals for the project. First, it wanted to reduce the portfolio managers' direct reliance on the accounting systems. Instead of each learning the intricacies of those complicated systems, he wanted to provide them with a simple graphical user interface (GUI). Secondly, he wanted to provide a single authoritative source of data so that a money manager in London and one in New York were giving their clients the exact same data.

Blaisdell also felt it was imperative to give the firm's managers browser-based access to the data, so they wouldn't be tied down to a particular desktop. Finally, he wanted to consolidate the many applications that the money managers were using onto one set that could be used firm-wide.

Fischer Francis set up a data warehouse that extracts all the data from the two accounting systems using Financial Technology International's Global Financial Data Model (GFDM). The firm had considered building its own data structure, but Blaisdell concluded that doing so would take an extra four to six months over the out-of-the-box solution. Blaisdell's IT team set up codes for each distinct data set, whether it be a specific mortgage or corporate bond.

Fischer Francis has gone live with the international side of the database, with the domestic side in the last parts of the beta test. The next step has been to create these enterprise-wide, browser-based applications using OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology provided by San Jose, Calif.-based White Light. Till now, Fischer Francis' portfolio managers have relied on applications that were developed haphazardly over time, employing nearly every programming language from C++ to Visual Basic to Fox Pro.

"We realized that a good part of our cottage industry applications were no more than different views, slices, drill downs of data in the portfolio accounting systems," Blaisdell points out. "At the top level, I might want to see a list of all portfolios and current NAVs, and then I might want to hyperlink to get over to another report where, for a given portfolio, it's broken up by security type ... White Light has basically addressed the need to play around with, drill down, roll up those types of activities."

White Light technology allows Fischer Francis to create dimensions, or pre-defined data sets, and views which rely on those dimensions. Dimensions can be created to group together data according to asset type, country block or credit rating. Views are then created that encapsulate the different dimensions.

"The great thing, for a specific view, if I've defined other dimensions, they may not be seen, but they are resting above and can be pulled down at any time," Blaisdell explains.

Fischer Francis has employed applets that will allow a standard browser to access all these views and dimensions. The firm is also using Cold Fusion technology for some of the more static reports, ones that do not require a money manager to play with the data. Those reports are set up with Cold Fusion tags which a standard Web server cannot read. Once a data query is received by the Web server it is passed along to a Cold Fusion server which extracts the data from the data warehouse and translates it into standard HTML. Then it can be pushed through the Web server and out to the user.