The hedge fund industry has adapted to many changes over the years—from new regulations to the massive shift to work-from-home operations in the spring of 2020. In a new whitepaper, we examine the factors that have enabled hedge fund managers to keep pace with those changes and rise above the competition.
|
The year 2020 has been one for the record books. Not only have we had to learn how to operate in a new normal of schooling and working from home, but we have finally seen the first of the semi-transparent ETF models that were approved in 2019. The launch came in the middle of a volatile market during a pandemic, bringing the total to twelve semi-transparent ETFs representing four of the approved methodologies on the markets. Although the NYSE Actively Managed Solution model is currently being utilized by American Century, it was Natixis Advisors in partnership with NYSE that helped lay the foundation for one of the four proxy portfolio methodologies to be approved in 2019. Recently, we sat down with Nick Elward, SVP, Head of Institutional Product and ETFs of Natixis Investment Managers for a two-part blog.
|
With all of the day-to-day rigors of running an investment operation, it is difficult to devote the time to look at your overall operations, but it is important to pause and consider areas to improve and your longer-term future needs. In my role as a product manager, I often hear from wealth management firms that are struggling to optimize their operations and feeling they lack a compass to help them chart the path forward. As one firm representative told me, “We just don’t know what we’re looking for.” I’ve seen hundreds of clients and implementations, and in this post, I share my perspective on some of the key aspects you should consider to grow and optimize your business.
|
In their blog post Handwriting OCR Vendor Analysis, Cano AI compared SS&C Vidado’s AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software against other top providers in the space. Cano AI, a consulting group focused on discovering and sharing the most cutting-edge automation solutions, filled out a generic medical document containing a variety of short-form and long-form handwritten responses like the ones processed by healthcare and insurance companies. They then submitted this document to all three services and manually analyzed the accuracy rates.
|
While managing through these challenging times, your business is likely also looking toward the future. With “business as usual” upended, you may be trying to position your firm for whatever comes next while staying ahead of your competitors.
|
Despite financial and political risks and the COVID-19 pandemic, the appetite for Infrastructure Investing continues to rise. Increasing population, aging transportation, outdated data centers and the availability of more efficient green technologies highlights the need for infrastructure investment. Healthy infrastructure has a huge impact on global communities’ ability to thrive and for local economies to prosper. While it seems that managers have been successful in raising funds, deployment has been slow for many managers.
|
For wealth managers and institutional asset allocation specialists exploring long-term investment opportunities, the onboarding of new financial instruments presents both data and risk modeling challenges. This investigation journey can be illustrated using a hypothetical cryptocurrency fund example as part of a broadly invested financial portfolio. This example also advocates the need for analytics to enable upstream data investigation, flexible risk model mapping and support for a broad range of simulation techniques within a cost-controlled environment.
|
COVID-19 and the resulting work-from-home (WFH) mandates have all but eliminated the benefit of maintaining in-house investment operations. This benefit is often described as control: the ability to “look over a shoulder” to ensure operations are running smoothly and issues are resolved quickly. Unfortunately, in-person control is no longer an option.
|