Leading Voices for Nasdaq Solovis: Eli Schoenberg, Global Head of Specialists

Nasdaq Solovis helps asset owners gain instant insights across their entire multi-asset class portfolio so they can create context faster and drive decision-making.

In this Q&A article series, we get to know the leaders behind Nasdaq Solovis who help power the platform and support the success of its asset owner clients.

This week, we spoke with Eli Schoenberg, Global Head of Specialists.

What does your role at Nasdaq Solovis involve?

I am currently the Global Head of Nasdaq Solovis Specialists. This is our Presales/Sales Engineering team, operating under a global mandate to facilitate prospective client evaluations of the Nasdaq Solovis solutions suite.

However, during my tenure with Solovis and Nasdaq I have held a variety of roles, including analyst, implementation lead, sales engineer, and director of analyst services.

How do you support asset owners?

My mission (and that of my team) is to bridge the gap between the needs and wants of allocator clients and the capabilities of our system and services to address those needs and wants.

In many cases this means adopting more sophisticated workflows with higher-impact analyses over time. For the client, this ideally results in higher confidence in data integrity, enhanced tactical decision-making capabilities, better understanding of performance and drivers of performance, and more efficient mitigation of risk.

What are 3 things modern allocators should be focused on that they are not currently?

1. Vendor Consolidation Trend

As more and more small to medium-size vendors are merged with or acquired by enterprise-level firms (e.g. Blackrock, Nasdaq, MSCI, SEI) it is fundamentally changing the vendor landscape in the market. How are allocators thinking about the trade-offs between the convenience of having a one-stop shop (single relationship, contract, integrated data, and technology) versus price monopolies and lack of best-of-breed point solutions?
 

2. Single Book vs. Dual Book

Many allocators have an official closing book process each month and/or quarter, closing on lagged data from prior periods for a significant portion of their book. 

This means that these allocators are analyzing performance, making investment and rebalancing decisions, and assessing risk based on a significant amount of stale data that is lagged by 3, 6 or even 9 months. Nasdaq Solovis natively features dual books, allowing clients to store, track, and analyze their official closed book numbers for each period, while sustaining a separate live book with best available data each day.
 

3. Sacrificial Data Decisions

Most allocators are resigned to a world in which vendors prescribe specific and limited data conventions, and each client must make sacrificial decisions about their data, analytics, and reporting to fit those conventions with their chosen vendor. 

Nasdaq Solovis allows for virtually any portfolio data model, any number and type of user-defined fields, and our motto for clients is “your data, your way”. You can have your cake and eat it too with Nasdaq Solovis as your source-of-truth database solution.

What’s the most rewarding part of working on Nasdaq Solovis?

Working closely with clients in the market, we are continually exposed to new market trends, new analytical practices and aspirations, and new ways of thinking about our data-based world. It is incredibly rewarding to be able to help clients by connecting them with our solution, while also expanding our own knowledge and imaginations.

Additionally, exposure to exciting opportunities, including regular interaction with some of the world’s leading financial figures (CIOs, hedge fund managers, governmental bodies) and travel events both domestic and international.

And, of course working should-to-shoulder with some of the most intelligent and creative individuals that I have ever met is a privilege.

What common asks/trends are you seeing from asset owners?

1. Continued allocation to private markets:
   Increased focus on private markets transparency and analysis of underlying holdings.
    
2. Recent increased allocation to fixed income and credit, both public and private:
   FI-specific analytics, such as FI Attribution, calculation of various metrics from terms and conditions such as duration and yield to maturity.
    
3. Portal access for clients of clients:
   Already a top priority for allocators, transparency, and by extension direct access to data, is becoming a greater focus for the the clients of our multi-family office, OCIO, and consultant clients.