SP Investment Group Limited provides investment advisory and management services to high net worth individuals, trusts, boards and charities in NZ. Director Stuart Pearse was looking for a more efficient way to analyse client portfolios and to assess investment opportunities and risk.
“One of the prerequisites to successful investment management is to be highly organised on behalf of clients. History shows that not being appropriately organised or structured ultimately leads to problems. The new SP Investment Group dashboard suite has delivered a highly efficient and unique way to analyse each client’s portfolio through the strategic lens that is relevant to the client.”
Previously, the firm had manually assessed client portfolios from custodial investment holdings data, with each portfolio analysed against a set of policy guidelines specific to the client. When investment opportunities arose, it used to take a day or more to analyse all the portfolios and to prepare recommendations for each client, which was a factor limiting the business’ future growth. Says Pearse:
“The business is successful due to taking great care with every client portfolio, and obviously I would like to continue to deliver a high level of care, as well as continuing to grow the business. Now that client portfolio assessments and recommendations take me around an hour to prepare in Power BI, rather than a day or more, and the level of organization around decision making is enhanced, growth of the business will continue”
The new Power BI dashboard suite is built on the highly secure Azure cloud, so SP Investment Group did not need to make a large IT hardware investment. Portfolio management rules are built in, making it easy to see at a glance how portfolios are structured, and when rebalancing is required. Auto-email alerts also notify client advisers when portfolio adjustments are required due to limit-breaks. And visual dashboards in the cloud are also easy to share with clients. This has added benefits beyond just keeping clients informed, says Pearse:
“At every meeting now I’m using the dashboards. Clients love them – they are visual and easy to interpret. They are also great for investor confidence – because clients can see clearly what’s going on with their portfolio, they know we’re doing a good job, have good systems in place, and are managing their funds properly”
He adds:
“As an investment advisor, there is zero flexibility around accuracy on behalf of clients. Everything needs to be operating at 100% - and that’s what we’ve delivered with this solution.”
The compliance experts who form part of the firm’s investment review committee (IRC) echo this sentiment:
“With this dashboard suite we can easily have confidence that SP Investment Group client portfolios are meeting the policy guidelines set by the IRC. It’s great for compliance, and I’m sure other independent advisory firms would benefit from a solution like this” Kirsty Campbell, SP Investment Group independent IRC Member
The engagement with Theta has been extremely positive for SP Investment Group, far exceeding Stuart Pearse’s expectations. He says “I had an absolutely first class experience” with the whole Theta team:
“They asked really good questions and quickly identified what I was after. Then they did what they said they would do, kept me well informed, were pleasant and professional, and patiently put up with all my requested adjustments – including meeting via Skype into the evenings multiple times”
The Power BI platform is a great foundation for this specialist investment advisory firm, and we’re looking forward to developing it further as the business grows.
Under the hood
Logic Apps cloud integration tool extracts data excel files daily from the asset custodian’s file server to Azure secure cloud storage.
Power BI converts those excel files into a series of reports and dashboards, referenced against the specific policy rules and guidelines set by SP Investment Group.
