Angela Centeno, CPA
Senior Research Lead
Angela Centeno has more than 25 years of experience in financial services. Prior to joining Cutter in 2015, Angela worked for The Northern Trust Company in multiple roles including sourcing and procuring enterprise market data, investment operations outsourcing, and vendor and custodian relationships. She previously held senior positions in operations management, project management, data management, and solutions implementation. Angela earned a bachelor of science in accounting and a bachelor of science in business administration from the University of Kansas, as well as an MBA in finance from DePaul University. She is a registered CPA.
Recent research assignments and publications include the following:
- AI Use Cases in Investment Management: Infinite Possibilities
- Alternative Investments
- Client Reporting Systems
- Cutter Benchmarking: Alternative Investments
- Cutter Benchmarking: Derivatives and Collateral Management
- Cutter Benchmarking: Firmwide ESG Capabilities
- Derivatives and Collateral Management Solutions
- ESG Data Management
- ESG: It’s a Jungle Out There ─ A Look at the Data Provider Landscape
- ESG Investing: One Vision, Many Lenses
- Market Data Administration
- Private Debt
Laura Jesson
Research Lead
Laura Jesson has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry as a project manager, business analyst, and consultant. She joined Cutter Associates in 2013. Prior to Cutter, Laura spent eight years at Wells Capital Management and Evergreen Investments, where she managed investment operations projects, including those focused on outsourcing, client reporting, and trade management. She previously worked at Omgeo as a member of the Central Trade Manager (CTM) product design team. Laura started her career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a process consultant supporting a variety of projects for clients in the financial services industry. Laura earned her bachelor of arts in economics and psychology from Amherst College. She holds the Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification.
Recent research assignments and publications include the following:
- AI Use Cases in Investment Management: Infinite Possibilities
- Business Intelligence Tools
- Cutter Benchmarking: Client Reporting
- Cutter Benchmarking: Firmwide ESG Capabilities
- Cutter Benchmarking: Managing Vendors and Service Providers
- DataOps: In Theory and Practice
- Enabling Data Analytics
- ESG Data Management
- ESG: It’s a Jungle Out There ─ A Look at the Data Provider Landscape
- ESG Investing: One Vision, Many Lenses
- Execution Management Systems
- Hybrid Work Arrangements and Their Impact on Firm Culture
- Using RPA to Automate Business Processes
- The Role of the CRM for Asset Managers
Allocations to private market investments have steadily increased in recent years, as institutional investors look beyond traditional investment vehicles to diversify their portfolios and generate higher returns. Yet day-to-day operations can pose a challenge for asset managers and asset owners investing in these more complex assets. Data for private investments is often unstructured and stale, with latencies of over three months a fairly typical occurrence for managers’ quarterly reports.
Of surveyed firms …
61%
plan to implement a new performance measurement and attribution (PMA) system or service by Q2 2027.
Source: Cutter Performance Measurement and Attribution Benchmarking study, May 2025
Performance measurement and attribution (PMA) teams are expected to provide accurate and timely performance, attribution, and risk information, even when dealing with private investments. But PMA teams struggle under the strain of data challenges, reliance on manual practices, and a patchy ecosystem of solutions.
To drive transparency and efficiency, firms are exploring the vendor landscape to understand how PMA providers are improving their solutions. In their reassessment of PMA solutions, firms are examining, among other requirements, how PMA solutions support multiple and complex asset classes.
In response to member demand, Cutter Research is launching a study of PMA vendor products. We have issued a detailed RFI to leading PMA providers and will share how these providers have advanced their products in recent years, including a look at how they support complex instruments.
As a preview, we’d like to pass along some preliminary findings.
We know firms struggle with PMA-related data integration. They want flexibility to connect to more sources of data, as well as the ease of sharing and distributing the data. One enhancement on the radar for multiple providers is improving integration capabilities for new datasets and sources. As the complexity and number of parties and systems involved in day-to-day workflows increase, some providers are expanding their API capabilities and drawing data from multiple sources to represent the PBOR (performance book of record). Vendors are also extending relationships and building integration with leaders in the risk and attribution space to offer flexibility and help connect widely accepted datasets and solutions. And we see AI being leveraged by vendors to automatically consume unstructured datasets in the private market space to reduce manual processing.
These improvements are particularly notable for firms that want to improve workflow and automation for PMA in private investments. Preliminary data from our recent 2026 Cutter Private Markets Benchmarking study (results to be shared in Q2 2026) shows that half of firms (52%) automatically calculate returns in a performance measurement system based on data inputs that are automatically integrated. The other half currently depends on manual steps to load data, calculate returns, or both.
Investment firms are being challenged by their consumers (clients and internal users) to provide more insights into PMA. Meanwhile, more investment firms are demanding the ability to blend public and private market returns when they exist in the same portfolio. Given that private market data lags in contrast to the daily public market data, a vendor's ability to provide a flexible methodology to blend these for total portfolio returns is quite important. PMA providers are incorporating more sophisticated and custom models, including new ones for cross-asset coverage. They are moving beyond simple time-weighted returns toward frameworks that integrate liquidity, cash-flow timing, and specialized risk factors.
Preliminary findings from our Private Markets Benchmarking study also show that half of firms use asset class-specific attribution models that identify factors unique to each asset class. Yet the other half still rely on generic attribution models, public market proxies, or have no attribution at all. The results also were similar for risk analysis, with 58% stating they rely on specialized risk models for each asset class, using underlying asset detail. More modern PMA systems offer granular “look-through” insights into private markets and multi-asset strategies to help asset managers and asset owners inform, justify, and communicate their decisions and resulting performance.
You told us that you’re looking to implement new PMA systems and services. We’re on it. Stay tuned for our upcoming PMA research to learn more about the providers and their solutions ─ and how they can help. We will detail the PMA functionality offered by several types of providers, including those from front-to-back providers as well as PMA specialists. In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss this topic, let’s chat.