Total Portfolio Approach

What is a Total Portfolio Approach?

A Total Portfolio Approach (TPA) is an investment management strategy that considers the entire portfolio as a unified entity rather than managing individual asset classes or sub-portfolios in isolation. By examining the entire portfolio holistically, investors can allocate capital in response to a dynamic opportunity set, avoiding the inefficiencies of rigid policy benchmarks and having buckets to fill. This strategic flexibility fosters better risk management, since potential exposures and correlations are captured in one framework rather than scattered across disparate systems. Ultimately, TPA can improve governance, sharpen decision-making, and deliver enhanced long-term risk-adjusted returns.

Holistic Integration

TPA emphasizes the need for an integrated strategy, where every asset’s performance is considered in the context of their contribution to the entire portfolio’s overall portfolio risk and return. Jacobi consolidates all positions—equities, bonds, private markets, and other alternatives—into a single, dynamically updated platform, enabling advanced historical and forward-looking analytics.

A Client-Centric Focus

TPA is client-centric because it prioritizes each individual investor’s overall financial objectives rather than focusing on individual asset classes in isolation. This strategy aligns investments with a client's goals, risk tolerance, liquidity needs, and long-term aspirations.

Enhanced Risk Management

Through a holistic risk model, TPA helps identify how each decision contributes to total-fund outcomes, rather than benchmark-relative performance, promoting better collaboration, clearer accountability, and more effective deployment of capital.

Accelerated Responsiveness

TPA enables investment managers to maintain agility and responsiveness to changing market conditions.This flexibility is crucial in navigating market volatility, economic shifts, and changes in client circumstances.

Enhanced Client Communications

Investment firms who employ a TPA framework can better communicate what investments are being made, associated risks, and how those investments work together to meet their financial goals.

Better Management of Assets & Liabilities

With TPA, the entire portfolio is viewed as a whole, encompassing both assets and liabilities. This integration allows investors to match the whole portfolio’s investment strategy with long-term liability needs and pacing of commitments

How Jacobi supports the Total Portfolio Approach

Designed for institutional investors, OCIOs and large wealth managers, Jacobi offers numerous benefits to investment organizations implementing TPA.

Key Challenges	How Jacobi solves key challenges
Disconnected systems and processes make managing and analyzing a total portfolio difficult and time-consuming.	Jacobi’s unique top-down multi-asset technology acts as a digital connection point for other systems and allows firms to seamlessly integrate their unique data structures, forward projections and models across the entire portfolio - saving time and reducing risks.
Difficulty collaborating across teams.	Jacobi promotes seamless collaboration across investment teams by offering a centralized platform with real-time data sharing, customizable reporting, and collaborative decision-making tools.
Difficulty managing risk across entire portfolio.	Jacobi enables users to assess risk at the total portfolio level, rather than individual asset classes. Perform bespoke forward-looking and historical analysis for different scenarios and stress events while managing portfolio risk and return objectives.
Difficulty managing liquidity and cashflows across a diverse range of public and private assets.	With Jacobi you can generate a complete picture of your portfolios liquidity and cashflow position by utilising our assets and liability modeling capability.
Difficulty generating reporting across a diverse range of assets.	Jacobi allows you to seamlessly connect portfolio composition and detailed ex-ante and ex-post analytics into client reports providing a complete picture to your clients across all assets.
Difficulty Maintaining Governance and Controls across all teams and assets.	Jacobi enables tighter governance controls around the management of portfolios with a suite of permissioning, controls and reporting.

Customization & Scalability Without Complexity

Jacobi’s Total Portfolio Approach (TPA) solution is built for flexibility—offering a range of configuration options to meet the diverse needs of institutional investors. By enabling user-defined groupings, custom scenario modeling, and tailored risk factor-based simulations, it seamlessly integrates with existing governance processes and reporting workflows. The result is a holistic, multi-asset framework that can be adapted to changing market conditions—without adding layers of operational complexity.

Does Your Technology Undermine Your Total Portfolio Approach?

A Total Portfolio Approach (TPA) promises a cleaner line of sight between an investor’s overarching goal and every capital‑allocation choice that follows. Yet many institutions still rely on legacy systems built for a world of asset‑class silos. This short thought piece highlights common fault lines, sketches the building blocks of a fit‑for‑purpose architecture, and sets out core principles no modern investment organization should ignore.

Beyond Benchmarks: Measuring Success In A Total Portfolio Approach

A Total Portfolio Approach brings new degrees of flexibility and a heightened focus on overarching objectives, but it also demands a more nuanced form of oversight.

Beyond Benchmarks: Why asset owners are trading SAA for a Total Portfolio Approach

Boards and Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) are starting to look at a TPA more closely, as its advantages over SAA become clear, but there are still perceived barriers to its broader adoption.

The Total Portfolio Approach: Why Leading Institutions Are Making The Shift.

What is a Total Portfolio Approach?

Benefits of a Total Portfolio Approach