Connor Broadley's experience using Portfolio Manager Experience (PME)

In July 2020, wealth manager Connor Broadley became the first UK client to use the SEI Portfolio Manager Experience tool. We spoke to Alex Twiss, investment manager at Connor Broadley, to learn more about his experience using PME and how it has revolutionised the way they work. The answers below are in Alex’s own words and reflect his opinions about working with SEI.

Q: How is the portfolio management process different from what you were using before?

Before partnering with SEI, we weren’t supplied with what we thought was a good enough portfolio management tool, so we actually built one ourselves. It was really a glorified, very computationally intensive set of spreadsheets that would try and ensure that we weren’t drifting too far from our central model. It would allow us to make changes to the model and push all the deals out, but took us a huge amount of time to update and operate because of the computational intensity. And the training that we needed to give our staff in order to use that was incredibly high.

Q: How has using PME changed your portfolio management process?

In terms of the whole process, I can’t tell you how much easier and significantly more robust it is. Even starting from the very basic principles of having models that drift is an incredibly useful tool — having a dynamic tool working in the background for that is so handy for us.

Secondly, when you come to do the re-balance, you’ve got a load of different ways you can come in at it. You can go to your drift analysis and rebalance to target weight at the top-level asset allocations. If you are looking to do the least amount of trades to get someone back to 60% equities that is great, or if you are looking to do a more broad range rebalance and push everyone back to where they should be, another important tool, you can do that easily in the system.

Finally, the server and processing power behind the back end shouldn’t be overlooked. Things that would take the old system a few hours to process are running closer to an hour for all of clients now. That’s through the whole process — updating the models, checking them through compliance for our checks, ensuring that we push the trades out and then getting them to the executions teams to have them executed and priced back. It’s an incredibly smooth and quick powerful process and we are still learning to use the functionality in the broader sense.

Q: How many hours is PME saving you from an administrative perspective?

Previously we were updating [our] portfolio management system on a daily basis because we would always have some inflows in. We would have the potential for some asset allocation shift to be needed at any point in the day, just the updating of our system would normally take us 30 minutes. You would then always have to run drift reports to get a sense of where the models were, that’s another half an hour, and if you were to do an investment strategy change, which we do semi-frequently, then you’d have to go through and compute, probably taking you about 8-12 hours to go through the entire client base.

In comparison, we are now doing that process in about an hour to an hour and a half. On the days that we make an investment allocation change, we are saving close to ten hours. If you multiply it out it was an hour not just of my time or of my colleagues’ time, but there would normally be three or four of us working our way through the client bank. That’s significant, especially for a smaller firm.

Q: As the first UK firm using PME, how has your first year on the system been?

As the first users of PME we recognised there was a commitment to feed back to SEI. We recognised that we would rather go for a more innovative solution and work through any issues and know that we are saving the most amount of time and won’t have to move again because we are on an old system that is creaking.

The key thing is we believe that SEI have the best system. The product was forward thinking and with all of the investment to build PME from the ground up, even though you had a portfolio management tool that was working, shows that you wanted to differentiate on that being the best possible solution in the market.

We have tested it to its max in the year that we have had it. It is no longer an unknown quantity it is very much a known quantity.

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