JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the latest financial firm to develop risk and portfolio management software for institutional investors.
JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank has partnered with StatPro — a competitor to risk analytics providers like BlackRock, Axioma, and MSCI — to offer “a genuine alternative in portfolio analytics,” according to Samik Chandarana, the bank’s head of data analytics, applied artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
“This partnership marks the first step in a comprehensive range of analytics services we will be bringing to clients through our digital platform,” Chandarana said in a statement Monday.
StatPro, which was founded in 1994, currently has around 450 clients, including fund managers and asset servicing providers. The portfolio analytics firm offers risk, performance, and portfolio construction tools through its flagship software, StatPro Revolution.
StatPro chief executive Justin Wheatley said in a statement that he believed the combination of the Revolution platform with JPMorgan’s existing data and analytics capabilities will result in a “truly differentiated product.”
Through the partnership between the two firms, the “full breadth of StatPro’s portfolio analytics solution will be integrated into JPMorgan’s digital platform,” according to the announcement.
Clients will have access to StatPro’s core multi-asset risk and performance attribution software alongside JPMorgan’s security-level data and analytics services. The new platform will offer portfolio analytics across asset classes with a focus on fixed income.
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JPMorgan signaled its shift into the investment software business last year when it began licensing out its internal trading technology – known as Athena – to asset management clients. Teresa Heitsenrether, the bank’s head of custody and fund services, told CNBC in November that the firm had by that point sold subscriptions to 208 big investors, with another 42 clients expected to sign on by the end of the year.
It wasn’t the first major financial firm to commercialize its internal software. BlackRock’s Aladdin platform — which now supports more than $18 trillion in assets under management for over 200 clients — also started out as an internal operating system.
JPMorgan has numbered among BlackRock’s Aladdin clients, though it is unclear if the firm still uses the platform. As of October 2016, JPMorgan was using a version of Aladdin within its custody banking business.
A spokesperson for JPMorgan declined to share whether the firm was still an Aladdin client.
