Modern investor tools (2): A platform that does the job for you

A new series on technology providers that assist asset allocators.

There is disruption in the investor part of the world of hedge funds, coming from platforms that can replace traditionally-run search and analysis. Here is one of them.

Looking for hedge funds to invest in and monitoring them can be costly and time consuming, and beyond the means of many investors who would benefit from such investments, according to Michael Appenzeller, managing director and founder of Etops, a middle office services provider based in Switzerland. So his firm started building a platform three years ago that allows hedge funds to list for free and gives free access to investors. It currently counts more than 11,500 hedge funds and more than 1,500 qualified investor users from the US, Europe and Asia. The revenue of the platform, called Fundbase, comes from the matching of investors and investments.

This web-based solution disrupts paper and facilitates and accelerates the entire investment lifecycle from discovering, to connecting and finally investing into any hedge fund. "It's not like in the old days you had to travel around the globe to find these return sources and analyse, build portfolios and actually invest in them; now you can do it in front of your computer," Appenzeller tells Opalesque.

"The reason you need Fundbase is simple; people don't have access to the broad array of risk/return sources that hedge funds do offer today," he continues. Fundbase is the Airbnb for hedge funds.

The platform includes classical strategies such as global macro and equity long/short, as well as innovative strategies with completely different return sources such as peer-to-peer lending, litigation finance, and life insurance secondary market.

It does everything from due diligence, risk analysis to portfolio simulation. Armed with all the data and all the tools they n......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.