‘Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable’

Jon Gaspar, a managing director at SLC Management, shares the best piece of advice he ever got and other insights about his career in performance measurement and attribution.

(FTF is reaching out to the speakers participating in the PMCR 2026 conference sessions. For this Q&A, we spoke to Jon Gaspar, CFA, CIPM, managing director, performance measurement and attribution, at SLC Management. Among the projects that are the most fun are those present automation/efficiency, programming, and model-building challenges. Gaspar adds that he is fine with stepping outside of this comfort zone because that’s where there the new opportunities are. “The best piece of career advice I’ve ever received is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” says Gaspar who is participating "Making Cutting-Edge Attribution Actionable for Portfolio Managers & Client Teams" session of PMCR 2026.)

Professional Background & Expertise

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your role and what your day-to-day looks like at SLC Management?

A: I’m the managing director of our Fixed Income Performance Measurement & Attribution team at SLC. I manage a team of six individuals who are responsible for all calculation and reporting of investment performance for about US$100 billion of assets under management, both public and private fixed income.

Our functions include everything related to performance measurement, benchmarking, performance attribution and GIPS Compliance. In my day-to-day, I take care of all of the management aspects of our team’s work, however, given the small size of our team I also work alongside my team members on various things with most of my attention focused in the attribution space.

Q: What’s a recent project or initiative your team has worked on that has made the biggest impact for your organization?

A: In 2025, our team completed a project, in conjunction with our IT and development teams, to create an attribution data storage and reporting framework across businesses within SLC. It has allowed us to take more ownership of our attribution data and create more custom attribution reporting for our private fixed income businesses, which have been growing significantly.

Q: What is your dream project?

A: My dream project would most likely be to design a music studio. However, if we’re talking about work, I’m not sure I have anything specific in mind but any projects within automation/efficiency, programming, and model-building are ones that are the most fun for me.

Session Insights

Q: What inspired you to participate in PMCR 2026 and speak on the "Making Cutting-Edge Attribution Actionable for Portfolio Managers & Client Teams" session?

A: I have spoken at the PMCR for the last two years of conferences and those experiences have been very fulfilling for me so that has certainly been an inspiration for this year.

I think what initially inspired me to participate was the fact that the PMCR is one of few conferences that go into as much depth on the performance side as it does and the topics across the board are usually very relevant to all functions within our team. Performance measurement and attribution teams are fairly niche within the investment industry and so I feel it’s important to stay connected with the same teams and individuals at other firms who understand us.

Q: What do you think makes "Making Cutting-Edge Attribution Actionable for Portfolio Managers & Client Teams" especially relevant for today’s investment operations landscape?

A: I think the need for attribution continues to grow within the performance space and is evidenced by the increased volume and detail of requests from consultants and clients.

Attribution teams have had to stay up-to-date on the latest offerings and models and continue to enhance their own products internally to satisfy the increased demand. At least from our experience, that usually means most of the time is devoted to ensuring attribution is compiled correctly and the numbers are reported internally and externally in a timely fashion.

The question then has to become how do we enhance internal attribution reporting to not just deliver the “what happened” but also the “what needs to be done?”. Finding that time can be tough but I think it’s an important conversation to have to ensure our attribution teams are doing the best things possible for their PM and Client teams.

Industry Challenges & Trends

Q: What’s one of the biggest challenges your team or clients are facing right now? Can you fill us in on how you are approaching it?

A: Over the last five-to-10 years, SLC has acquired multiple different asset managers, which has created challenges from a systems and a data perspective. We have been working diligently and continue to work on centralizing processes and data to increase efficiency and make it easier to support a broader array of investment products.

Q: How do you foresee technology (A.I., blockchains, digital assets, automation, data analytics, etc.) reshaping your area of expertise over the next year or two? Any major shifts you are preparing for?

A: I am of the belief that we should always be evaluating new technologies as they arise to see if they could potentially have a material impact in improving our day-to-day.

We have implemented things like SQL to Python and have leveraged cloud technologies to reduce process complexities and increase the speed of data processing.

Everyone is, of course, talking about A.I. and I think for our team, one of the biggest use cases is on the attribution side to help with generating draft commentary on attribution results. Using an LLM [large language model] to source market data changes and applying them within a RAG [Retrieval-Augmented Generation] framework that has been fed current and historical attribution results could be a pretty powerful way to produce product-specific commentary at a baseline level. There is a lot of time spent on gathering market data and analyzing those changes and this is something that could save a lot of time.

Q: Which technology has impressed you? Which technology has disappointed you?

A: I think there have been a handful of things on the A.I. side that have been impressive and have added value to everyday things both inside and outside of work. I don’t think there has been anything recently that has disappointed me from a technology standpoint.

The PMCR Experience

Q: What are you most excited about learning at PMCR?

A: I think the agenda for both days on the performance side is pretty strong so I’m looking forward to all of the sessions. I think specifically within them, I’m most excited about sessions that are covering data visualization, A.I., risk metrics, predictive intelligence, private markets and digital assets.

Q: What do you hope attendees walk away with after hearing your session?

A: I hope that attendees are able to empathize with the challenges in communicating attribution results to internal teams in a way that creates takeaways from a portfolio management and trading perspective. If we can introduce some specific strategies for solving this and provide examples of how it has worked for us within our firms that would be a good outcome.

Getting to Know You

Q: What’s one thing people might be surprised to learn about you?

A: One thing that I think people would be surprised to learn about me is that I play guitar in a band with my Dad.

Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received (or would share)?

A: The best piece of career advice I’ve ever received is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I can look back on a lot of times throughout the growth of my career and even in life where I encountered new opportunities, challenges, surroundings, etc. that made me feel uncomfortable. That advice has always encouraged me to face the new with an open mind and to step out of my comfort zone, which is not always easy to do.