9 Hedge Fund Managers Test Cloud Reporting System
August 23, 2011
Hedge fund administrator Conifer Group and InvestCloud are testing a new cloud-based reporting platform with nine hedge fund managers.
The Conifer iCon service will allow clients of the San-Francisco based fund administrator to offer more sophisticated investor, risk and performance reports using a cloud-based repository hosted by InvestCloud. The joint venture called InvestCloud Solutions was announced in April and will be officially launched on September 12. The affiliation represents an exclusive agreement between InvestCloud and Conifer Fund Services, an affiliate of Conifer Group.
Conifer will retain its order management system licensed from Eze Castle, a unit of ConvergEx, a portfolio accounting system Geneva from Advent Software and a pricing and security masterfile service provided by Paladyne Systems. Conifer’s data aggregation, repository and reporting platform will operate on the cloud and provide a more advanced level of performance and risk attribution as well as a high degree of customization.
“The affiliation with InvestCloud allows us to create customized real time reports from information aggregated by InvestCloud’s platform from the multiple internal middle and back office engines instead of the standardized batch reports,” says Jack McDonald, chief executive of Conifer Group which has 175 hedge fund managers as clients. “The joint venture with InvestCloud will successfully complete our three-year plan to reengineer our business model that will satisfy the data aggregation, analytics and reporting needs of our more sophisticated clients.”
In addition to mashing up data from multiple sources, the new Conifer iCon will leverage online processing such as intraday accounting and provide a time machine to review data over multiple time periods.
The new more sophisticated reporting and risk analytics permit Conifer, which historically focused on small to mid-sized hedge funds, to expand its reach into the larger hedge fund community and more successfully compete against other large independent hedge fund administrators such as Citco and SEI. Other fund administrators such as State Street have also announced plans to use a private cloud platform to offer middle and back office services.
Conifer will migrate all of its clients onto the new iCon platform by early next year after which time it will start marketing its services to traditional mutual funds and pension plans.
“Our belief is that enterprise software for small to medium sized investment managers will die as cost and complexity will become too much and best of breed deployment will prove too difficult to install and maintain,” says John Wise, chief executive of the Los Angeles- based InvestCloud. ”Through our cloud-based platform, our new offering will provide the functionality demanded by the industry at a third of the cost when compared to any similar enterprise software solutions.”
Wise, former chief executive of New York and London-based data management software firm Netik, launched InvestCloud last year.
