Zephyr Upgrades Analytics Offerings

Zephyr Associates has upgraded the analytics center on its public website, StyleADVISOR.com, to offer complimentary mutual fund analysis, the firm announced on July 12.

“If you look at the evolution of Zephyr as an organization, we’ve always tried to bring the top-of-the-pyramid, most sophisticated analysis to the bottom of the pyramid; to a broader base,” Marc Odo, director of applied research for Zephyr, told AdvisorOne on Thursday.

“Zephyr’s platform was initially designed for large institutional plans that were doing high-level, academic analysis,” Odo said. “But we weren’t only selling to them. That type of analysis we started selling to people who worked at brokerage firms, independent advisors. The whole industry’s gotten much more sophisticated.”

Odo noted, “Zephyr’s suite of offerings has evolved over the years. Zephyr itself is two decades old. Our flagship program is a desktop-based application, called StyleADVISOR. It’s very powerful, very robust, but this whole industry is evolving.”

To accommodate the industry’s growing need for products that aren’t “one-size-fits-all,” Zephyr created two Web-based programs.

“Zephyr OnDEMAND is a distribution tool for people who like the full-on StyleADVISOR, but don’t necessarily think it makes sense to give that much horsepower to everybody in their organization, but they still want to get Zephyr analytics to their people in the field,” Odo (right) said.