Visible Decisions And The Northern Trust Company Set The Pace For Strategic Investment Analysis
Institutional investors have a new perspective on their investments as a result of a joint development recently completed by The Northern Trust Company and Visible Decisions.
This new service, called Northern Trust FundDimensions, offers the latest in 3D graphical techniques to review complex investment results.
With Northern Trust FundDimensions, the institutional investor can better manage a broad portfolio of investment types and currencies. The graphical nature of the system gives the user access to the big picture and the ability to explore detail in one comprehensive application. Later this year Northern Trust will begin delivering FundDimensions to clients through Passport, its on-line desktop for institutional client account access and reporting.
"Institutional investors benefit from looking at their investments from many perspectives," said Jeff O'Neill, vice president of strategic product development for the Risk and Performance Services Group of Northern Trust. "FundDimensions allows them to evaluate their portfolio performance against expectations, peer groups and a variety of market indexes. The system also provides insight into investment manager style to facilitate fine-tuning of the portfolio. This a total solution approach to managing investments."
The service will initially be used internally by Northern Trust Risk and Performance consultants to support client-servicing activities. "FundDimensions allows us to be more responsive to our clients," said Lori Kazich, senior-vice president of Risk and Performance Services. "Now we can spot trends that may have been previously obscured by the sheer volume of data. This represents real value to our clients."
Development of FundDimensions was a collaborative effort between Northern Trust and Visible Decisions' consulting staff. "We are pleased to have teamed with Northern Trust on this project," said Rob Marks, vice president of marketing for Visible Decisions. "It's a further illustration of how visualization is being used in successful mainstream financial applications."
Established in 1992, Visible Decisions is a North American software company specializing in the delivery of high value business visualization solutions. Business visualization is a powerful combination of data, 3D graphics and interaction that dramatically improves how quickly users can understand huge amounts of data and take action -- key in today's competitive global market.
Visible Decisions' customers have applied business visualization to cut through complex data, improve communications and enhance the decision-making process. Customers include leading software vendors and discerning members of the Fortune 1000 and federal government agencies. For more information on Visible Decisions and its solutions, please visit http://www.vdi.com.
The Northern Trust Company (http://www.northerntrust.com) is a multi-bank holding company with worldwide locations and is a leading provider of master trust, global custody, risk and performance, treasury, retirement, and investment management services for corporations and large institutions. As of March 31, 1999, Northern Trust had $1.3 trillion in assets under administration, and over $243 billion in assets under management.