Blogs

In today’s society, we are increasingly seeing investors move diversity, inclusion and more broadly ESG (environmental, social and governance) to the top of their requirements of their asset managers. Not only do today’s managers have to demonstrate track record and attract investment in a fiercely competitive environment, they have to do so whilst demonstrating commitment to the “right” kinds of investment. To put it bluntly, the market for managers who do not have any specific commitments to these modern principles…...

As the world continues to battle an international health crisis, this month we wanted to take a look at the topic of process resilience and what this means for alternative asset investors, managers and service providers. What is process resilience? Process resilience as a concept arose from software development, and it is a measure of the ability of any process to tolerate faults. Processes can be made fault tolerant by arranging a group of processes, with each member of that…...

Fund administration and servicing is a hot button topic in alternative investments. The conversation has moved on from whether to outsource, to one where service levels and takeover activity are being increasingly scrutinised. Each week, participants see headlines of titanic mergers and acquisitions being financed from the huge pool of commitments that have flooded into buyout funds in the last decade. With high costs of change for customers and high barriers to entry maintained by governments, regulatory bodies, and entrenched…...

In the finance world, it is a rare day when we don’t hear about automation and technology transforming how operations are conducted. From AI to robots to machine learning and virtual banks – sometimes the future can seem daunting. In wealth management for example, we now have retail access to products which are completely automated – think of Nutmeg and Moneyfarm as two pioneers in the UK. In alternative assets and specifically in PE and VC, we face a specific…...

People are at the heart of any organisation, and it is important to recognise that people are not machines that are content to spend their time mimicking them. People have ambitions, cognition, flexibility, ethics and emotional intelligence that cannot be replicated by machines. In alternative assets though, we subject many people both on the client side (GP/LP) and the provider side (vendors and service providers) to a barrage of manual tasks despite a plethora of software solutions, and increasingly qualified…...