Julie Snogren
Director, Consulting
Julie Snogren joined Cutter in 2021 and bring extensive expertise in performance and attribution - from oversight, calculations, monitoring, and managing the regulatory environment to automation of reporting and customizing reports for complex portfolios. Her experience includes deep dives into investment approaches that explain manager decisions that drive investment results. She has worked with equity, fixed income, multi-asset investment, and alternative portfolios, providing a solid understanding of the fundamental drivers of returns across a range of markets.
Julie’s experience in various roles also involved substantial emphasis on independent research, and the creation of communication materials and presentations. In Julie’s most recent role as Vice President, Global Performance Measurement, at Brown Brothers Harriman, she led a team of analysts that supported the global client base for all performance and attribution needs. She worked on various products across the fund range, including 40 Act, ETFs, UCITS, institutional/separate accounts, and alternative portfolios. Her accomplishments in this role included initiating and leading RFPs, resulting in the implementation of SS&C’s Sylvan Application. Other successes in this role included product roadmap enhancements and efficiencies to the workflow that increased current client adoption of performance services from 14% to 40% and increased new client onboarding by 68%.
Prior to her role at Brown Brothers Harriman, Julie spent 12 years in various roles at Oppenheimer Funds, where she led the Performance Measurement team. She ran the production of alternative product financial statements, utilizing GAAP, FASB, GASB, and Insurance accounting standards inclusive of the audit coordination/completion. Julie also spent time in several analyst roles in fund accounting, which gave her the opportunity to be the lead on multiple high-profile projects, involving the creation of GIPS requirements, designing the accounting workflow for newly acquired institutional products, and the successful start-up of several commercial paper conduit portfolios.
Julie holds a bachelor of science in accounting from Columbia College and a Graduate Certificate of Advanced Study in Management from Northeastern University.
The success of a performance measurement and attribution team requires that investment decisions are well supported, internal stakeholders receive accurate insights, and the organization maintains transparency in its investment outcomes. Successful teams provide clear, actionable feedback that can influence portfolio management, compliance, and risk assessment. A high-performing team should not only meet current demands but also anticipate future needs. Below are several methods to measure your team’s success.
Effective Quantitative Metrics
Not all functions within the team, from production lifecycle to time-to-completion to analyzing results, carry the same weight. To understand your efficiency metrics, separating responsibility volumes will help you determine the ideal workload per analyst, among other benefits.
The results of the metrics mentioned above are most useful in helping management evaluate how effectively the team utilizes resources, including time management. Getting a clear picture of the team's productivity provides many advantages while highlighting areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, such as insights into processes that need automation to increase efficiency. This can also expose gaps in the workflow ─ for example, where the team has taken on additional validations or reconciliations from historical errors that have occurred, essentially creating a Band-Aid for an upstream process or technology gap. A firm’s ability to track volumes and workloads over time can also drive business cases to optimize the team’s responsibilities and support requests for additional resources.
A key component is tracking ad-hoc requests. Although self-service capabilities have increased in this area, performance teams still spend a portion of their time responding to ad-hoc and customized requests, which can be time-consuming. Understanding where the volume of requests is coming from and on what data can help drive the direction of increasing standard reporting or developing additional self-service options.
Your firm’s performance measurement and attribution team relies heavily on your data integrity. Poor data quality undermines credibility and prevents meaningful analysis ─ in addition to extra work. Understanding where data is a hindrance can help drive projects for better data management and a smoother workflow.
Effective Qualitative Metrics
Assess how well team members communicate with each other. Collaboration and support play an essential role in the team’s overall success. Gauge engagement of the analysts through participation in team meetings and encourage idea generation and open discussions with each member to assess morale. High collaboration and engagement lead to knowledge-sharing, team and individual growth, and increased staff retention.
Equally important is maintaining communication and engagement with the team’s stakeholders. Set a meeting cadence with the users (for example, client-supporting teams and the front office) to validate which data is utilized, review content/templates, and provide clear understanding of the limitations and/or opportunities.
Effective Feedback Metrics
Solicit feedback regularly from the respective performance, attribution, and analytic consumers. This will provide insights into trends, blind spots, and areas where consumers feel they could be better supported. It will also validate what is working well. By combining these methods, the performance measurement and attribution team’s success can be measured holistically. This approach creates a process to monitor team and individual performance, identify inefficiencies, and provide support for business initiatives. It also drives improvements for optimization while ensuring that team members provide high value and remain aligned with the investment organization’s strategic goals.
If you haven’t yet, check out the executive summary of Cutter’s Performance Measurement and Attribution whitepaper. To learn more about optimizing your firm’s performance measurement and attribution or to speak with a Cutter research analyst or consultant, contact us at [email protected].