Reporting Process
Since its founding in 1929, Lord Abbett has maintained a singular focus on the management of money. As an investment-led, investor-focused firm, Lord Abbett evaluates every decision from an investment perspective, in an effort to achieve a superior, long-term investment performance on behalf of its clients. Currently, Lord Abbett has more than $140 billion in assets under management.
We helped to develop a monthly process, to summarize and disseminate portfolio statistics, such as sector and credit quality breakdowns, average durations, and holdings concentrations. The system handles mutual funds, separately managed accounts, institutional client accounts, and third party indices and blends. As a part of the client’s team, we created a consistent process to:
For all this, the system supports different values in different
contexts, such as when comparing a fund to different benchmarks. It
handles funds-of-funds, differing policies for split credit ratings,
and offers various approaches for handling derivatives and defining
cash.
Each month, the system processes more than 20,000 instruments, and
generates more than 5,000 reports for use on lordabbett.com, in the
client materials, and in the reports for Lord Abbett’s board of
directors.
The system uses metadata to define how to extract the holdings of various portfolio data sources, convert them to a standard form, normalize their values, and match their positions to securities that may already exist in the database. It provides for human override and complete history tracking of all values.
In the course of this engagement we introduced additional agile development practices. We set up an automated testing environment on TeamCity, and configured it to run the entire process with a limited data after each code change, and full overnight run on a clone of production data. Also, we helped introduce automated testing, continuous delivery, frequent deployments, and shared code ownership. These practices are now spreading throughout the firm.
The Ratings Retrieval Process was one key element of a much larger development project carried out by Montrose Software for Lord Abbett.
As you can see in the diagram below, 2 further elements are connected to this, and you can view case studies for the other 2 steps – Reporting Process and Reporting UI. All 3 steps create a completed solution.