Recent years have seen explosive growth in the retail market for alternative investments, or “Retail alts” in the shorthand of the industry. Once the domain of sophisticated, wealthy qualified investors, the alternatives marketplace is being demystified and democratized. According to RIA Intel, around 45% of private wealth advisors allocate some of their client assets to alternatives.
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Asset allocators, whether they invest in hedge funds, private equity, or other managed accounts and comingled funds, have to process a massive number of documents as a byproduct of those investments. Portfolios with 100 private investments receive an average of 4,000 documents annually from fund managers, including transaction and capital call notices, valuation statements and financial statements. These documents need to be immediately categorized and sorted, with their information captured and made accessible as needed. Manually processing these documents—a time-consuming endeavor that carries substantial risk for errors—is a major roadblock to producing a consolidated view of portfolio holdings.
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The world’s financial system is vulnerable to malicious activity from fraudsters, identity thieves, terrorists, money launderers, and other criminals. This vulnerability is why regulators have such strict requirements for banks, investment funds, investment managers, fund administrators and other financial entities to validate the identities and intentions of their customers and prospective customers. These customer checks are also known as customer due diligence (CDD).
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In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, researchers and institutional investors became more interested in liquidity risk modeling at large. As market and funding liquidity assessment have now become key requirements for major regulatory bodies, fund managers and risk specialists have sought to integrate liquidity risk analysis into their daily operations.
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While fund managers are among the most skilled professionals in the industry, their insights can fail to resonate with investors without strong operational support. The increasing cost of compliance and infrastructure, combined with poor fund structure and lax reporting can disrupt the efforts of even the best fund managers. It’s important to focus on four key areas to get the most out of their operational relationships.
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After our annual SS&C Deliver Conference, themed “Delivering the Future,” one thing was clear without a crystal ball—intelligent automation is playing prominently in the future success of health and wealth industries.
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This benchmark study helps firms to assess pricing sources in support of their vendor selection and due diligence processes. This year we are pleased to add the MarkitAxess pricing service to the set of fixed income evaluations providers profiled.
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Managing voluntary corporate actions (VCAs) has many challenges, as we covered in our "Middle Office Series - ​Voluntary Corporate Actions" podcast. Processing these corporate actions is operationally risky; if events are missed or elections are submitted late or incorrectly, the consequences can be costly—some institutions have experienced losses in the millions of dollars.
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