The people behind the analytics: Riaan Burger

In this instalment, we speak to Riaan Burger, Director of Product Management, Revolution. He has spent 22 years in the industry focused on performance measurement and attribution, and leads the direction of the solution that many firms in this market rely on to measure and explain investment performance. Here is what he sees in this market. 

Performance, risk and attribution are not explained by software alone. The people who understand what the numbers are saying play an essential role. In the people behind the analytics series, we speak to the Confluence experts who do just that across South Africa, working with the investment firms and service providers we serve.

Q: What is the most common question you are asked in your work with clients?

A: The question I get often is: “How do South African asset managers compare to their global peers?” My honest answer is that South African firms are generally very sophisticated and often compare well with global managers, particularly in performance measurement, attribution, and multi-asset investing. The main differences tend to be scale and technology investment rather than analytical capability.

That distinction matters, because the two are often conflated. A smaller firm is not a less sophisticated one. What scale affords is infrastructure; the capacity to fund large operational teams and absorb the cost of running multiple systems. It does not confer better analytical thinking, and the South African teams I work with are asking the same questions of their data as their international counterparts. 

The practical consequence is that technology has to do more of the work. Where a firm operates with a smaller operational team, its analytics need to be comprehensive from the outset rather than assembled from separate components. That is the gap Revolution is designed to close: performance, risk, composites, fixed income attribution and ESG delivered within a single modular solution, allowing a focused team to work to a standard that would otherwise demand considerably greater resource. 

South African firms are generally very sophisticated and often compare well with global managers.

Riaan Burger, Director of Product Management, Revolution

Q: What are South African asset managers and asset owners focused on right now, and how is that shaping the analytics they need?

A: South African asset managers and asset owners are exploring ways AI can improve efficiency, transparency, and decision-making across the investment reporting process. Rather than spending time gathering data and producing reports, investment teams want AI to automate reporting, generate performance and risk commentary, surface key insights, and answer portfolio questions on demand.

The groundwork required to support that ambition is considerable. Commentary generated on inconsistent data is more damaging than no commentary at all, because it is produced quickly and carries an apparent authority it has not earned. Before a firm can interrogate its portfolio in natural language, the underlying analytics must be accurate, complete and consistently calculated — which requires automated data importing, controls applied at the point of ingest, and market data mapped correctly across every instrument type held. 

That foundation is where the greater part of our product effort is directed, and it is the reason Revolution is built around a controlled analytical process rather than a reporting layer applied to data of uncertain quality. Where that foundation is sound, more advanced capabilities become natural extensions of it. Where it is not, automation applied above it can never compensate. 

The firms making genuine progress are those approaching this as a question of data and process in the first instance. The efficiency gains they are seeking are entirely real, but they are built on a well-governed analytical process rather than serving as a substitute for one. 

Q: What is the most common mistake you see in how firms handle performance or risk, and what would side-stepping that unlock? 

A: One of the most common mistakes is applying a performance attribution model that does not align with the investment decisions being made. The purpose of attribution is to explain performance in terms of manager decisions, so the methodology must reflect the portfolio construction process and sources of active risk. When firms use the wrong model, attribution can be misleading, making it difficult to understand what truly drove returns.

The mismatch is rarely obvious, which is what makes it a persistent issue. A top-down sector-based model applied to a portfolio built by bottom-up stock selection will still produce a full set of numbers, and they will still sum correctly. They simply describe a decision-making process that never took place. The same is true of a portfolio managed with an explicit currency view being run through a model that treats currency as a residual effect. 

This is why we built Revolution around multiple attribution models rather than a single house methodology: top-down single-level and multi-level attribution to security level, bottom-up attribution, and advanced currency overlay. The model should be chosen to fit the investment process, rather than the investment process being explained through the single model a system imposes. For fixed income the same principle applies, which is why the model is designed to produce low residuals with fixed income effects assigned correctly. 

Getting this right unlocks clearer investment insight, stronger manager accountability, better-informed portfolio decisions and more credible client reporting. The change I find most striking is internal: when attribution genuinely reflects how a portfolio is run, investment teams start using it to examine their own decisions rather than to justify them after the fact. 

Q: What is the biggest change you have seen in how investment firms measure and explain performance and risk, and what do you see coming next? 

A: During my time in the industry, the biggest shift has been towards more frequent valuations, faster and more accurate performance reporting, and greater transparency for investors, boards, regulators and other stakeholders. What once took weeks can now often be delivered in near real time. 

That change is easy to state but was difficult to deliver. Moving from a monthly cycle to on-demand analytics is not the same process running faster; it requires the calculation, the data controls and the reporting to be engineered for this purpose from the outset. Scalability is a large part of what we build for, and cloud-based, resilient workflows are what make it possible for a firm to ask for a result today rather than at month end. 

Looking ahead, I expect the next major change to be the adoption of AI to automate reporting, explain results, surface insights, and make investment analytics more accessible and actionable for decision makers. The most valuable applications will not be the most visible ones. Automatically drafting the first version of a performance commentary, or flagging the three things in a portfolio that changed materially this period, saves an analyst hours and is entirely achievable on well-governed data. 

What will not change is the need for the analytics underneath to be accurate. An explanation produced automatically still has to be defensible in front of a board or a regulator, and the firms that benefit soonest will be those that invested in a controlled analytical foundation before the technology arrived to sit on top of it. 

What once took weeks can now often be delivered in near real time.

Riaan Burger, Director of Product Management, Revolution

Q: Describe a client problem you enjoyed solving. What made it interesting?

A: I particularly enjoyed building out reporting for a private assets portfolio using data from Revolution and custom-built Rev-i reports. The client was looking for a reporting solution that could meet their existing requirements while providing greater transparency and flexibility. 

We worked closely with the client’s performance team to understand their existing reporting framework and ensure that the new solution matched, and where possible improved upon, what they had before. 

The most rewarding part is always seeing the client’s reaction when the solution is delivered and knowing it has made a real difference to their business. The enhanced reporting provided greater transparency into how the numbers were calculated, making it easier for the team to answer stakeholder questions and explain results with confidence. Knowing that the solution improved both their reporting process and their ability to communicate insights made the project especially satisfying. 

An industry leader for over 20 years, Confluence Revolution is trusted by investment firms and service providers worldwide, supporting over 100,000 actively managed portfolios.

Our South African experts work with it daily, alongside clients, which is why the answers in this series are grounded in practice.

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