When Advent first introduced The Professional Portfolio (aka Proport) 25 years ago, one feature that contributed largely to its long-term success was the ability to get data in and out of the program easily. Advent software has continued to make this feature a priority throughout every iteration of their original portfolio management product line.
In contrast competing products like Centerpiece, which would eventually be purchased by Schwab and rebranded Portfolio Center, appeared to be a black box. You could see what was being calculated, but could not see the components of the calculation.
Proport files were stored in an open text format and could be easily read and written as necessary. Axys v1.x, Advent’s premier Windows product at the time, maintained a similar open file structure. Axys v2.x was the first version to implement a binary file format. At the time, some users were concerned that the format change would complicate maintenance of existing customized solutions and inhibit their ability to continue to create solutions that exchanged data with Advent’s portfolio management system.
Firms were slow to embrace Axys v2.x and some never upgraded to it. Perhaps it was concern over the new file formats. Instead, most firms eventually upgraded to Axys v3.x. Concerns about the format change were moot since Advent also introduced IMEX, which allowed users to import and export files in CSV, tab, and fixed formats.
Exceptions apply, but the IMEX tool facilitates the ability to move data in and out of Axys with relative ease. The features of IMEX combined with the ability to import transaction and label data through the trade blotter provide a comprehensive means to get fundemental data in and out of Advent Axys and APX. Additional methods of importing and exporting data follow:
Axys users may write or read data directly to data files if they have knowledge of the underlying data format. However, this is not a best practice due to changing file formats between versions. For example, upgrading from Axys v3.7 to v3.8 requires a file conversion process. Some of the resulting Axys v3.8 files have a different file format, so any process directly writing or reading these files would need to be updated to take the new file formats into account.
APX users may
- query the APX database via Excel (and other software programs).
- write SSRS or Crystal reports to extract data.
- use many other SQL based tools to export and import selected data.
Axys and APX users can
- export reports directly to Excel with the push of a button or create a macro that stores report output in XLS and other file formats.
- create custom reports via Report Writer Pro, which can easily be changed to CSV format.
- modify existing replang reports to build CSV, other text formats, and various Advent file formats.
- use third-party Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) products like xPort.
APX (v1.x to v4.x) maintains the functionality of IMEX, but the ability to generate files in a fixed format has been eliminated. In addition, you can export data to an Axys v3 format.
Due to these capabilities and a host of other Advent features that facilitate automation and integration, Axys and APX users as well as third-party vendors like ISITC.com have developed many custom solutions utilizing Advent Software’s infrastructure to address day-to-day investment operations workflow and reporting requirements. The building blocks of these solutions faciliate subsequent projects and allow investment firms to further enhance Advent’s portfolio management systems to meet their evolving needs with less effort and cost.
Here is a sample of some VB code we use to integrate and automate data handling of exported Axys and APX data. The code can be used in Excel with VBA and User-Defined Functions (UDFs) to pull data from Axys and APX like Bloomberg BLP functions are used in Excel. This function is just one of the routines in our library of code that enable us to seemlessly integrate our solutions with Advent’s infrastructure. I wrote the original source code for this routine twenty years ago and have updated it as necessary to support later releases of Axys and APX.
Using similar resources, integrators can move quickly from prototype to production when developing solutions for Advent users. In fact, Advent’s most recent annual report continues to cite customers building their own solutions as one of their largest sources of competition. For instance, a number of firms have created their own Order Management Systems – not that I’d recommend it.
Advisors abhor inefficiency and are typically willing to make a reasonable investment to reduce it. Automation not only increases efficiency, but lowers risk by eliminating manual processes that may rely on individuals and their exclusive knowledge of manual or semi-automatic procedures. Some financial services firms have customized their systems to a degree that makes staying on the Advent platform for twenty plus years possible and the thought of switching to another platform regrettable.
Thanks to the way Advent handles getting data in and out of their systems, users can continue using Axys to meet their ever-changing system requirements and leverage most solutions created for Axys on the APX platform. Similar and potentially better tech options may exist on other competing platforms, but most of those systems lack the maturity, depth of resources, third-party relationships, and corresponding reliability of Advent’s platform choices. Knowledge and acceptance of these competing products among advisors, employees, and third-party solution providers won’t match Advent for a long time.
As a result, even though technologically superior portfolio management platforms may emerge, many firms will continue using Advent’s best known portfolio management systems for the foreseeable future.
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About the Author: Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide.
For details, please visit isitc.com, contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.