Alternative Market Briefing

The technology vendor’s vantage point: bye bye Excel, hello transparency and new generation of fund managers

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London:

Advent Software, a technology provider headquartered in San Francisco with fingers on the hedge fund industry’s pulses (mainly hedge fund managers, fund administrators and prime brokers) has seen a lot of traction in the U.S. as well as in Europe - especially since the end of 2008.

The reason for that has predominantly been an increasing need for infrastructure, Chris Cattermole, Advent’s EMEA sales manager told Opalesque in a recent interview in Advent’s London offices. As indeed, hedge funds are having to build out more operational efficiency and cater for due diligence demands from the new institutional investors.

“Hedge funds are really trying to reduce their use of Excel spread-sheets, trying to focus on automation and making sure that they have an efficient operational environment, as well as procedures that would appeal to the end investors,” he said.

Bye bye Excel Before 2008, institutional investors’ operational due diligence process used to be a check-box exercise with questions like ‘what asset classes do you trade’, ‘which investments do you do’, ‘what is your staff’s experience,’ according to Cattermole. Now, due diligence is more assertive and asks questions such as ‘do you invest in swaps’, ‘how do you track them’, ‘how do you track the financing behind the swaps’, ‘what systems and what expertise and what intellectual property do you have in operations to cater for those asset cla......................

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