US EAST COAST 2012 - HFMWeek

US EAS T COAS T 2012
FUND SERVICES
Conifer has been at the nexus of operational change facing
managers and investors. We were motivated to do
something unique given the increasing demands our clients
and their investors were putting on Conifer
as a middle office and fund administration provider.
Increasingly since the credit crisis of 2008,
more and more demands are being placed for
greater transparency on portfolio performance,
risk reporting at the portfolio level, and the
ability to store and manage data efficiently. We
chose to respond to those demands by providing
a better reporting dashboard for our clients and
their investors.
HFM: Why did you choose to partner with InvestCloud
JM: Looking at the myriad third-party options
available in the marketplace, we were struck by
the lack of any one integrated platform that could
achieve our customers’ demands. Rather than
trying to assemble multiple systems together, we
decided to build our own via our joint venture partner, InvestCloud
Solutions. InvestCloud was founded by a team
of industry veterans who have distinguished themselves in
building industry-leading data warehouse and reporting
platforms.
InvestCloud’s technology expertise and Conifer’s leading
reputation for client-centric asset services is a powerful
combination that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the marketplace.
InvestCloud Solution’s first product was iCon, built
for the Conifer Group. Through Conifer iCon we are
IT IS ONLY A MATTER
OF TIME BEFORE THE
ENTIRE MARKET MOVES
TO ADOPT CLOUD-BASED
COMPUTING
”
now providing our clients with an integrated dashboard
that encompasses trading, portfolio and risk reporting, operations
and investor reports all in one place.
HFM: What are the various component engines
in your cloud platform
JM: We strive to use the industry standard, or best
in class processing engines and then tie them together
using our proprietary technology. We have
been able to focus exclusively on the core capabilities
of the various engines that we chose and
use them to build our product. The InvestCloud
product is a component-based platform, so we can
work with any processing engine that a client partner
would want to utilise and incorporate that into
the overall platform.
HFM: How are you marrying your middle and
back office processing expertise with this cloudbased
solution
JM: We continue to provide, on a daily basis, middle
and back office support to our managers by handling
portfolio accounting, daily reconciliation, and independent
pricing. What we are now able to do is complement
that asset service by offering a better view into the portfolio
performance through the iCon dashboard. We have
developed a powerful and elegant software as a service
(SaaS) solution whereby iCon has been developed to be
a ‘wrapper’ around our core services.
Fund administrators have become increasingly important
to managers and investors alike. To deliver the value
that people are seeking from administrators today, one
needs to have powerful technology for portfolio & risk
reporting, overall data management and investor communications.
We now have that via a customisable and accessible
dashboard.
HFM: What value does this provide your customers
JM: Our customers now have an all-in-one dashboard that
incorporates a portfolio accounting engine, a risk engine, a
trading engine, a pricing engine and an investor reporting
engine. The dashboard can also pull in other systems that
one might want integrated with the reconciliation work
we do on our clients’ behalf with respective prime brokers
and custodians. It brings all of those different systems into
one location and then renders the data in a very customisable
and valuable way.
HFM: What are the hurdles/benefits facing hedge
funds looking to move to the cloud
JM: Adopting new technologies can often prove to be a
hurdle for some, as change (of any sort) can, by definition,
challenge the status quo. Where firms are set in their ways
with people and processes, our solution can appear quite
revolutionary. Cloud security also comes up as a concern,
though as people get used to paying bills and doing their
banking on-line, acceptance is growing. Part of embracing
a cloud solution depends upon a firm’s cultural approach
towards adopting new technology. It is only a matter of
time before the entire market moves to adopt cloud-based
computing. The world is much closer to cloud computing
than most people realise. Watch this space! n
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