Why do portfolio management systems offer so little in the way of flexibility when it comes to their reports. Instead of using Crystal Reports (or something similar), they build their own proprietary solutions, making it much harder for firms to do anything more than stick their logo on the reports.

Wall Street & Technology magazine did an informal survey among their readers and found something astonishing:

…nearly half the firms reported that they use an enterprise solution that is a combination of a proprietary solution and a vendor-supplied solution for client reporting. Most said they use Business Objects’ (San Jose, Calif/Paris) Crystal in combination with proprietary solutions… Significantly, however, about 80 percent of the firms that participated in the survey said their platforms do not meet all of their periodic and ad hoc reporting needs.

I assume that by “platforms” they’re talking about portfolio management software, which uniformly lack good reporting solutions. How hard would it be to rewrite your client reports using Crystal, and let your clients edit them? (Ok, probably pretty hard.)

In the case of Techfi, we consciously avoided Crystal because we despised their technology , but regretted the decision almost immediately after releasing our own custom report writer–any minor quibbles with Crystal tech were far outweighed by the complexity of creating our own report writer. I suspect that Advent’s reasons stem from a “we build everything ourselves” mindset, and in the case of Centerpiece/PortfolioCenter, they probably have an existing library of reports in DB4 or whatever their original software was written in.

So the end result is that clients find it extremely difficult to write custom reports, which is something most large advisors would love to do. You can’t easily go in and move fields around, change fonts, colors, or add a graph here and there. Let alone build one from scratch that has a new calculation. Most advisors become dependent on the professional service departments of their PMS vendor.

The Wall Street & Technology article mentioned something called SS&C Pages, which I’d never heard of before. Here’s how SS&C describes the product:

Pages… generates customized client statements automatically. Pages helps you enhance client service by producing impressive client statements that automatically assemble data from your portfolio management, CRM, performance measurement and other investment systems.

So it’s an overlay on top of your existing portfolio management solution. Their stock reports certainly look good (compared to Advent, Centerpiece and Techfi at any rate):

But I still feel this quality of reporting is something that should be a standard feature in a portfolio management system. The fact that there’s an entire market built around substandard portfolio management reporting means there’s a lot of room for improvement.