The 2015 Tech 50: Jim Minnick

Jim Minnickis betting big on alternatives. The CEO of eVestment has created the world’s largest institutional asset management database, with performance, asset flows and other information on more than 62,000 investment vehicles, including 26,000 hedge fund and other alternative strategies. Later this year the former Watson Wyatt & Co. consultant plans to add private equity to the mix, following the May acquisition of TopQ, a two-year-old Edinburgh, Scotland, firm that has a suite of cloud-based tools for investors to analyze and monitor private equity funds in a standardized and transparent way. “Because the company is relatively new, the product they’ve built has the latest technology, so there’s a really nice user experience,” says Minnick, 45, who co-founded Atlanta-based eVestment in 2000 with his wife, Karen, and two Watson Wyatt colleagues. “We should be able to utilize some of that technology across the eVestment platform.” With nearly 1,000 institutional investors and consultants as clients and more than 400 asset managers using its Omni product to minimize the time and effort required to report their performance figures to some 60 consultant and third-party databases, eVestment grew its revenue by “north of 20 percent” in 2014, says Minnick. The company added 100 people over the past 12 months and now employs 350 in offices in Atlanta, Dubai, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, New York, London and Sydney. In February it launched Scorecard, which enables asset managers to evaluate their investment strategies across several areas, including asset flows, distribution impact, marketability and performance. “Scorecard brings together the output and analytics from multiple eVestment products,” Minnick explains. “It helps asset managers to evaluate opportunities to grow assets.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”