Sr. Consultant - Investment Performance Attribution

About Northern Trust

As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions.

Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide.

With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Role Summary

Northern Trust Asset Management is a trillion-dollar investment management firm entrusted by investors around the globe to help them navigate changing market environments so they can confidently realize their long-term objectives.

The Senior Consultant will be responsible for attribution analysis across a range of mandates spanning all asset classes and investment styles. This role will analyze attribution results and articulate the sources of alpha and beta through written commentaries that integrate quantitative analysis with market and economic dynamics. The individual will understand various attribution and risk models, calculation methodologies, index constructions, and attribution use cases, with the ability to work independently to research sources of P&L and tracking error. The candidate must demonstrate strong mathematical and analytical proficiency based on prior experience and interactions with investment teams.

The scope of responsibilities will include generating high precision and quality investment performance attribution analysis to be used as feedback loop for different investment teams.  Ability to have intellectual discussions with portfolio managers to assess the effectiveness of their strategies decision making process via attribution.  In addition to the portfolio managers, this role will act in collaboration with business partners including Risk Management, Product Management, Sales and Marketing, performance and accounting, and various operational teams, to implement strategic solutions for data issues, enhance methodology and define fit-for-purpose attribution analysis, optimize the use of attribution for clients and client facing functions.  The role will leverage NT technology and analytics and external technology/analytical platforms primarily Aladdin, FactSet, Perform, Bloomberg and Morningstar to continuously refine and deliver meaningful performance attribution that explains the investment outcomes effectively.  

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

As a subject matter expert on investment performance analytics and attribution, the individual will have ownership and accountability to provide end-to-end attribution analysis for multiple asset classes such as Fixed Income (taxable and tax-exempted), Equity (fundamental and quant), Multi-Asset (FI/EQ, FoFs) with either passive or active management styles.  Responsibilities include:

• Using attribution and risk models on platforms such as Aladdin, FactSet, Perform or Bloomberg to create attribution analysis that can be used by the PMs as feedback loops to validate the results of their investment strategies or exposure management, on a daily and monthly basis.   
• Incorporate quality and fit-for-purpose attribution analysis into various management reports as the objective data that illustrates the drivers of over and under performance on the portfolio level.   Design and refine quality control mechanisms that are meaningful and impactful to improve accuracy of attribution analysis.
• Timely and effectively response to inquiries related to the methodology, data issues and accuracy of attribution analysis; appreciating the sources of inquiries maybe an attribution super-user or a novice with simple questions and treat all inquiries with respect and patience. 
• Monitoring ex-ante data set and use them as a reference point to validate the ex-post attribution results to understand the end-to-end view of the overall P&L creation and validation process. 
• Coordinate with core-competency teams upstream to solve for data issues that cause attribution to be less effective such as Corporate Actions, indices/benchmarks, pricing, schedules for options, and accounting effects that are outside of PMs’ control.  Aiming to implement strategic solutions to reduce the data issues upstream.
• Provide timely response to address any attribution analysis needs by our client facing teams/functions for client reporting, pitch-book, RFP/DDQs and other by-demand analysis