Hedge Fund Administrators Get Ability to Show Comparative Results
December 6, 2011
PerTrac, a provider of hedge fund analytics software, has just started a new service to allow hedge fund administrators to deliver performance tear sheets to their clients, including how well funds performed relative to benchmarks.
Hedge fund managers, in turn, can offer these tear sheets to investors as independent, third-party verification of their hedge fund performance. Butterfield Fulcrum, a hedge fund administrator with more than 800 hedge fund clients, is one of the first administrators to take advantage of PerTrac’s new Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS). In a statement issued by PerTrac on Tuesday, Butterfield Fulcrum says it has fully integrated this new service to recent infrastructure upgrades.
Fund administrators are responsible for the books and records of their hedge fund clients. They compute a hedge fund’s profits and losses and keep track of monthly or quarterly net asset value, accounting for investor contributions and withdrawals.
Accessible via a cloud-based service operated by Microsoft Azure, PerTrac RaaS frees fund administrators from the time and expense of calculating performance measurements and producing customized reports to compare the performance against benchmarks. Over 10,000 global benchmarks can be used in the reports and PerTrac has a repository of over 900 performance-based statistics to build these reports.
The data relative to the performance of each fund manager by each fund is given to Pertrac which within seconds crunches the data to generate the comparative results. That compares to the several hours it might take an administrator to do the work on its own through an excel spreadsheet, which is also error-prone.
Standardizing performance reporting makes it easier for both hedge fund managers and hedge fund investors to see how well the fund is performing relative to their peers, and for hedge fund investors.
The new service debuts at a time when institutional investors are demanding more transparency and independent verification of performance results from hedge funds.
“Transparency, governance and independence in the assessment and reporting of all performance related measurements and processes continue to be the main concern of every institutional investor,” says Lisa Corvese, managing director for global business strategy at PerTrac in New York.
