How Advent Geneva® Can Give Your Alternative Investment Firm a Leading Edge

Upgrading Geneva^® can be a substantial challenge for many organizations. Companies point to difficulty allocating resources, concerns about interrupting work flow, and miles of red tape as reasons why they’re still using an old version of Geneva^®. Last month, Advent released the latest version of the Geneva^® and World Investor platforms. At GFT’s Alternative Investment Practice, only two out of dozens of clients have initiated an upgrade to the new version 14; most clients are still unaware of the release.

However, despite the obstacles that can stand in the way of an upgrade, the benefits are substantial. Upgrading to the latest version of Geneva^®, particularly in an environment where competing firms are slow to do so, will give your company the leading edge. New versions provide more accurate valuations, more efficient workflows, reduced manual input, and reduced errors. Support of older versions is phased out by Advent, with all versions prior to 8.5 losing support this year. Rather than sticking to the status quo, companies which are adopters of Geneva^® upgrades are streamlining and improving operations.

To help make the benefits of upgrading to Advent Geneva^® 14 clear, we’ve put together a list, curated by the GFT Alternative Investment Practice’s top technological and finance specialists, of what we believe to be the top 4 most beneficial new features for alternative investment firms.

The Top Four New Features in Geneva^® 14 For Alternative Investment Companies

1. Ability to Track Custom Data in Price Lists

Geneva^® now gives you the capability to track non-pricing data within price lists. This allows users to link liquidity, market capitalization, and other data to tables, making it accessible through custom reports or Data Browser queries. This feature will make Bloomberg accelerators more useful by allowing users to pull additional data like moving averages or average volume. On the software back end, a new built-in function called Price3 exists to retrieve the non-pricing data created by this functionality. This makes custom report development easier and more efficient, providing a more robust reporting tool for users.

2. Day Over Day Profit and Loss by Strategy Report 

This new report allows users to see day over day totals for gains and losses according to strategy. Many GFT clients have asked for this functionality in the past, requiring custom reporting and development work. Advent now provides this capability out of the box, making it easily accessible to new Geneva^® adopters. Additionally, this report can be used as a starting point for further modifications according to a user’s specific needs.

3. Extracting and Importing Portfolio Data with Knowledge Date History and Variants

Advent has expanded upon the PortfolioExtract utility by creating two new functions – ExportPortfolio and ImportPortfolio. These two functions exceed the previous PortfolioExtract capabilities by preserving key historical information, accounting data, and transaction IDs. This novel feature allows for more informative portfolio sharing with clients, and more comprehensive disaster recovery plans. Additionally, this new ability to select a subset of portfolios shortens test preparation times, allowing for more agile quality testing.

4. Permanently Deleting Variants of AGA Object

This new feature is incredibly useful for larger Clients. Previously, any time a change was entered into any field within an object, Geneva^® would create an entirely new copy of the object.  This took up considerable memory and would often cause problems for clients who had over 100,000 products, especially for firms utilizing an external security master data source.  In this case, extremely minor changes, such as adjustments to a user defined field, would cause a new version of the object to be created.  The Purgevariant function can resolve these difficulties, resulting in significant AGA size reduction, improving overall system performance, GUI response, and report times.

We invite you to download this white paper for reference, and if you want to learn more, please visit www.gft.com/ai, or contact Herman Weintraub at herman.weintraub@gft.com.