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Continuus, an Acuity Analytics company, moved equity attribution from flat files into Snowflake, cutting processing time from up to six hours to under one minute and giving business users self-service portfolio restatement.
The Client
A global investment management firm that relies on equity attribution, which explains what drove a portfolio's returns, such as stock selection versus sector weighting.
The Problem
The firm ran attribution through a slow, multi-hour flat-file process. Restating a portfolio, or rerunning attribution for a past date, meant coordinating business users, IT, and FactSet every time.
Business users couldn't trigger a restatement themselves, so each request became an IT ticket and a vendor support call.
The Solution
Continuus moved the attribution process out of flat files and into Snowflake.
- Rebuilt the attribution workflow in Snowflake, removing the manual file handling between systems
- Connected directly to FactSet through Snowflake data sharing, so data arrives without file transfers or vendor coordination
- Built stored procedures that let business users restate any portfolio for any historical date on their own, without IT or a FactSet support call
- Compared the new outputs with historical flat-file results to confirm they matched before going live
The Outcome
- Processing time reduced from up to six hours to under one minute, so analysts can rerun and explore portfolio results during the day instead of waiting overnight
- Business users restate portfolios themselves in Snowflake, with no data engineering request or new file extract
- Removing the flat files took a fragile manual step out of the workflow, lowering the risk of data errors and the effort to manage recurring runs
- The same setup can take on additional attribution models and datasets
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