GSCS Information Services has been active in the area of Transaction Cost Measurement for more than ten years, meeting the needs of institutional asset managers and pension funds throughout Europe and Asia. Some of the real advantages offered by our service and experienced by our clients include

• the ability to provide analysis of trading performance based on more than 25 different benchmarks (multi-benchmark capability). Our benchmarks include various measures of implementation shortfall, cost of delay, market impact and opportunity cost, including all those currently used by U.K. and U.S. pension funds. The measures are based around a number of time stamp dependent benchmarks (time-stamp analysis) as well as daily trading information and underlying security characteristics

• the provision of information via an easy-to-use on-line reporting capability (the itero service). This provides clients with the opportunity to review data using any mix of selection criteria they consider valuable and also allows for more effective identification and analysis of trends by GSCS personnel

• the highly sophisticated technology infrastructure which allows for easy delivery of information from clients to GSCS and reporting from GSCS to clients on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. This allows much faster review of data and identification of trends

• the U.K. base of operation which allows GSCS to be more responsive to changing client requirements and affords a lower cost of operation and hence lower fees to clients

GSCS is independently owned and managed. It is not part of any larger financial group, undertakes no brokerage or asset management business and as a result has no conflicts of interest in providing analysis of execution performance and transaction costs.

GSCS works with investment managers to help them progressively improve their trading performance and hence the investment returns they achieve for their clients. Our approach is consultative rather than proscriptive and seeks to recognise the diverse nature of the needs of our individual clients.

By focusing on the needs of each client individually and offering a flexible approach to a complex subject GSCS aims to be not only the only transaction cost service a manager would ever need but also the one they would most enjoy working with.

GSCS also works with pension funds whose needs are quite different from those of investment managers. They want to be satisfied that their transactions are being completed efficiently and effectively with minimum loss of value to the fund itself, whether through commissions or execution costs. They want a consistent approach to the subject and one that allows them to confirm that costs incurred are reasonable in the context of the mandates involved and competitive with others in a similar situation. In the rare cases where this is not the case, pension funds want to be alerted at an early stage and given the tools to engage in a dialogue with the manager concerned.

Most pension funds do not want, and should not need, to become closely involved in the detail of execution strategies individual transactions. Nor do they wish to incur a significant expense in an area where gains are likely to be small compared to investment returns and where their involvement in generating improvement can only ever be indirect. GSCS tailors the cost and structure of its services to pension funds to meet these objectives.

Investment managers

Pension funds

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