The result is the new performance-measurement and reporting tool Sentinel. Manager-database provider Informa Investment Solutions (IIS) has integrated capabilities of its performance-measurement and client-reporting service provider Investment Scorecard, a business it acquired early in 2007 with similar capabilities provided through its Performer suite in a hybrid platform called Sentinel.

"Sentinel enables our organization to streamline our elite products and services into a plug-and-play offering that can be an off-the-shelf or tailored one-stop shop solution to the investment- and wealth-management industries," says IIS managing director Lac Vuong. "Sentinel integrates consultation, software, and service bureau and brings about seamless implementation that can deliver drastic cost and process efficiencies to both our clients and our company."

This approach, adds Vuong, "is priceless [at] a time [when] companies are required to deliver more with less."

Elusive

Integrating performance reporting with proposal generation, and taking into account the end-client's goals and tolerance for risk, Sentinels helps advisors evaluate portfolios, research money managers and propose personalized plans for asset-allocation and portfolio implementation.

At Sentinel's heart is IIS' PSN, a database engine that provides statistics on nearly 1,200 investment managers and 6,800 products, performance details on 25,000 mutual-fund, ETF and equity strategies.

The combination of Performer and Investment Scorecard gives IIS' institutional clients -- brokerages, bank trusts, investment advisories, wealth and money managers and retirement-plan sponsors -- more ways to assemble and rationalize data in customized performance reports, according to IIS.

In addition, Sentinel can capture and conform to each firm's business and compliance rules -- "an invaluable assist in this hyper detail-oriented industry," according to an IIS blurb on the merged platform.

"Sentinel is the elusive one-stop shop from proposal generation to performance reporting," says IIS senior v.p. Glenn Skidmore.

White Plains, N.Y.-based IIS is a subsidiary of the London-based publisher Informa. -FWR

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