[ A D V E R T O R I A L ]
managers and their clients can plug in
and automate data production, as well as
help with client relationships.
The automation of this data can also
benefit the front-office for private equity
managers. Veritas Capital’s Donner added
a tool that can consolidate data across the
entire business and can then be applied to
help front-office decision-making will be
of great value to the alternative invest-
ment community.
“We want to take all of the information
we are collecting in the organisation, plus
external information, and find some value
from it, specifically to our front-office so
they can use that data to predict cognitive
performance, look for trends or use it in
the investment process,” Donner high-
lighted.
However, while new applications and
new technology may well be good in
principle, the problem is how to tie all
of these systems and platforms together.
With each piece of technology being so
specialised, there is a risk that they may
not integrate with each other and the
fund manager may not be able to extract
the necessary data.
“We are buying more solutions, but we
are pushing on all of them to help us with
the integration piece so that we are not
working with all of these different tech-
nologies that we then have to run reports
out of and load onto another system,” said
Margaret Mangelsen, director of account-
ing and operations at Argentem Creek,
a $2 billion emerging markets-focused
hedge fund manager.
Technology vendors, such as FIS, are
now being tasked with providing some
form of standardisation that enables a
seamless integration between legacy and
new technology platforms.
“The holy grail is to integrate all of these
technologies, and bring a standardised
concept. Our approach to solve that prob-
lem is to standardise how these systems
talk to each other,” explained Chung.
“If you look at the concept of an app
store on your phone, there is a whole
industry called integration platform-as-
a-service that is trying to do the same
thing. We want to work on something that
integrates like a public application to help
our customers bring everything together.
Our end goal is to get to a place where we
can deliver technology on a continuous
delivery model and standardise a lot of
the integration process.”
It is increasingly becoming a reality
for alternative fund managers to adopt a
new technology strategy. As the industry
evolves to meet new investor and regula-
tory demands, doing nothing with your
technology is not an option. At the same
time, fund administrators will have to
adapt their service offering and providing
new tools to meet these demands.
Whether new technologies such as
robotic process automation (RPA) and
blockchain will become part of servicing
alternative fund managers remain to be
seen. But the demand for efficiencies and
value-added services could mean these
technologies will become part of the
mainstream sooner rather than later.
Winter 2018
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