GSCS provides post-trade transaction measurement services to institutional investment managers and pension funds primarily in the U.K. and continental Europe. GSCS services are sophisticated, flexible, easy to customise and are built on a unique proprietary technology platform that maximises efficiency and minimises administration for clients and internal personnel.

Output for clients comprises two distinct aspects. First is the traditional provision of data. Client transactions are evaluated individually against multiple benchmarks and the data is then presented both as aggregated summary reports and at the level of individual transactions. The data is available on-line through the itero service with full drill-down capability. This offers clients the maximum flexibility in what kinds of reports they produce, the frequency of the reports and the key parameters that they use to best understand the quality of trading activity they have completed. GSCS also produces individual highly custom reports available in pdf file format to meet specific client needs. Standard reports in hard copy and/or pdf are also available for clients who request them, but form a diminishing part of activity as clients become more sophisticated in how they access and use data.

The second form of output is analysis and research. By its very nature this is client specific. The aim of the analysis and research is for GSCS to work with the client to identify and exploit opportunities to secure improvements in trading performance. The new Landscape analysis service offers an unusually comprehensive view of client performance and the ability to feed the results back into the trading process in the form of pre-trade strategy optimisation. An example at a lower level is the provision by GSCS of written analysis for pension funds which allows them to concentrate discussion with external managers on areas where underperformance appears consistent and financially significant. In all cases GSCS makes use of its proprietary database of transactions maintained within the GSCS Universe.

GSCS is able to analyse both equity and fixed income trades completed by managers in global markets without limit. While the nature and availability of data may constrain some analysis, GSCS is able to identify any shortcomings and draw attention to them in its analysis and results. GSCS considers implementation shortfall, cost of delay, market impact and opportunity cost within its framework for both data provision and research and analysis.

Services section

Typical clients

GSCS staff profiles