The Alternative Manager Perspective

“I would like to see managers value people, and the infrastructure needed for people to do their jobs, above cost,” an asset owner told interviewers conducting a recent EY global survey on alternative investing.³

The sentiment expressed by that investor is indicative of a larger aspect of the state of play in alternative investments – specifically, investors and managers have different priorities and view their relationships through different lenses. Of course, both want their investments to perform like gangbusters, but how they get there matters, too.

Wanted: Improved reporting

In the same EY survey, 40% of investors indicated that improved reporting is among the top three things they’d like their managers to focus on; enhancing middle- and back-office technology is on the top-three wish list of 13% of investors. In other words, they’d like to see their managers invest in the “infrastructure” mentioned by the investor in the EY survey.

Improved reporting has been on the minds of investors for some time now. In a 2017 SEI/Preqin survey of LPs⁴, only 12% of investors said reporting frequency was unimportant to their firm when evaluating funds and fund managers. At the time of that survey, less than 40% of investors said they’d seen an improvement in reporting frequency during the preceding three years. (It should be noted that the current crisis has brought out the best in GPs as communicators, according toPrivate Funds CFO, which recently reported that “GP communication has often been a point of dissatisfaction among LPs, who generally want more, specific and easily digestible data from their managers. But in the current downturn, LPs have reported frequent and broad communication from GPs…” The question is, will the new found love of communication extend to reporting post-crisis?)

Customization in demand

Everyone loves customization – institutional investors, included. Alternative investment firms are being challenged by investors to be original and create solutions that aren’t off the shelf boxed offerings.

• Nearly half of institutional asset owners invest in funds with customized fees and liquidity terms.
• More than a third invest in funds with customized portfolio exposures and funds with customized transparency and reporting.⁵

In addition, more than a third of investors who already enjoy the benefits of customized elements expected to increase their investments to the funds that provide them.

最近，在Covid-19衰退之前的Deutsche银行调查表明，近三分之一的机构投资者现在已经定制了任务，平均占总资产的约9％。亚博赞助欧冠⁶

With customization and diversification in demand, managers are taking a second and third look at their product offerings to see where there is room for innovation. Customization of investment strategies, fund structures, and investor communications should all be anticipated. To achieve what investors want in customization, managers will also have to reassess their operational and technological infrastructure to establish if and how they can accommodate the launch of innovative products, entry into new markets, and/or the provisions of further detailed and more timely reports. After all, operations and infrastructure should be viewed as catalysts for growth, not roadblocks.

Lessening the hassle of onboarding

A few years ago, research found 58% of private equity funds said fundraising time had increased compared to their preceding fund – and 16% said it increased significantly.⁷No doubt part of that time was spent on LPs filling out non-standard subscription forms, which are typically dense paper documents that leave plenty of room for errors and omissions and require time intensive review.

“In the alternatives industry, there is no standardized subscription documentation for alternative investment funds,” says Joe Henkel, currently Ireland country head and one-time Director of Global Solutions at SEI, one of the world’s leading providers of technology-driven wealth and investment management solutions. “Each private fund has unique qualities, and a law firm will create subscription documents and investor packs that can run to 40 pages or more. They differ between each law firm, fund product and jurisdiction – it is quite a fragmented industry from that perspective. Given that the first impression many LPs get is this inelegant sub doc process, it’s not surprising that investor reporting is equally non-standard and often unsophisticated.”

In short, no investor will ever say they love filling out subscription forms – they want to invest their money! Investors want simplified onboarding processes that take less time. In turn, managers might find easier onboarding shortens the time necessary to raise funds, which can in turn enable them to make speedier portfolio investments.

Transform your organization by learning more about how to improve the investor experience.

吉姆沃伦has a bird’s eye view from which to observe the pain points between investors and their asset managers. Warren is theSVP, Head of Solutions and Platforms, Global Wealth Management ServicesatSEI, a global leader in providing new infrastructure platforms, solutions, and services to investors and wealth management firms. He recently spoke with II to share what he sees as the ways alternative investment firms can gain a competitive advantage.

In your conversations with alternative investment firms, where do they see themselves as needing the most help?

Investment firms focus most of their effort and spend on the investment process – everything from research to security selection to ongoing due diligence – as they should. Historically, they haven’t really focused as much of their time and effort on the investors themselves – and that is a shortcoming they are increasingly recognizing.

Where do you see the opportunity for them to improve the investor experience?

To improve the investor experience overall, they need to focus on the aggregation of data across multiple vendors and throughout the firm itself, fund administration activities, and any operational outsourcing. Drilling down, there’s a big opportunity in hyper-focusing on investor data management from onboarding, to aggregation, to the racking and stacking of data, and delivering it back to the investor. This is the underserved and underutilized part of the business. That could become particularly important to firms especially now, as they tend to realize how much more important client relationships are when there’s any kind of economic downturn or extreme market volatility.

当然，投资者的期望也会改变 - 而且管理人员需要跟上。

我同意。即使你只是回顾全球financial crisis of 2007-2008, you can see the evolution of investor expectations. That’s when regulatory processes and institutional investor concerns over transparency really started to drive the requirements around managing data on investors and providing more transparency into investments. More recently, you’ve had firms looking at different ways they can increase assets under management by creating more opportunities across different types of investors – maybe going down from just focusing on large institutional firms and looking a little bit more at family offices and individual investors and how you can distribute to them. That requires a strategy around what your distribution model is going to be. To establish that, you need to look at everything from how you handle research and analytics to the actual underlying investments, vehicle structure, and terms and conditions.

If managers succeed in generating new opportunities outside of their typical universe of clients, would that place greater emphasis on the investor onboarding process?

Absolutely. We’ve invested heavily in creating a digital onboarding process to make the experience of starting a new relationship better for the investor as well as the manager. It decreases the time that it takes to onboard so that assets can be invested sooner. At the same time, a digital process kicks in regarding how investors interact with their funds going forward. There is consistent, timely interaction between the manager and the investor, and that helps forge a stronger relationship.

What makes your onboarding process different?

Traditional hedge fund subscription documents, for example, can be up to 40-60 pages long. It’s a laborious process to fill them out, mail them, and have someone review them only to find you incorrectly populated some data or made simple mistakes answering questions. Back it comes to you to fix, and back you send it, and so on. For the investor, it can be a very slow going before their assets are actually invested, and even then, the information flow about the investments can be agonizingly slow. For the manager, it can take a significant amount of time to onboard just one investor – time that could be used for more valuable, additive activities.

At SEI, we recognized that we could remove the actual paperwork by digitizing the document in a way that allows for flexibility, because every sub doc is different. In what we callSEI交易, we use rules-based capabilities, where we can take a hedge fund’s sub doc and turn it into an easy online experience, populating only the necessary information and efficiently processing it. The built-in rules and workflow prompt review and approval by all necessary participants, including legal and investor relations at the fund complex. So, we’ve not only improved the experience, but we’ve also put controls in place that streamline and improve the quality of the processing. What used to take months can now be done in weeks, if not days.

You’ve talked about the relationship between managers and investors. How has the dashboard experience changed for both?

About 15 years ago we recognized a need to give our clients online access to their data, rather than just sending them hard copy documents and data stubs. At the time, we built out what we called our Manager Dashboard, which was essentially a report writing capability that took the data we were processing for our clients and delivered it online in an actionable way. Around the same time, we started offering anInvestor Dashboard, which initially was simply a secure document portal. For example, the statement an investor normally would have received in the mail could be viewed by logging into the highly secure portal.

随着时间的推移，我们从管理人员听到他们想要发送投资者图形，图表，底层数据和其他信息，并且它变得更加真正的仪表板。经理希望深入了解数据并开始使用报告，投资者希望数字形式的透明度，图表和图表中的视觉效果。从我们的角度来看，想要所有的经理和投资者都指向相同的数据和文件集。这在创建一致性和控制方面非常重要 - 提供一致的信息集，但是经理能够控制他们向投资者提供的数据。您可以描述经理和投资者在其仪表板上视为基于角色的视图。例如，如果某些东西是估计，经理可能不想向投资者向投资者展示。在替代空间中，管理员可能不会向实际安全性的级别提供透明度。他们可能只是告诉投资者的行业，行业，资产课程和所投资的国家 - 这只是该业务的本质。

SEI has been a leader in financial technology-driven solutions for a long time. Do you see more managers looking to outsource their technology needs rather than try to keep up with the cost of the latest innovations?

我认为它更多的是关于焦点和意图 - 我们可以脱掉哪种技术，以便他们可以专注于他们工作的基于更值的部分。在监管方面，例如，我们可以做很多处理，以便经理只需审查输出并重视可能影响公司的任何可能。一旦经理对外包合作伙伴感到满意，他们经常开始考虑他们可以委托的其他内容，以便他们的公司可以专注于其核心功能和能力 - 而他们可能将基础工作外包给可值得信赖的伴侣，他们仍然可以保持终极控制和权威。我们不谈论它比我们更聪明。我们可能会说，“我们为250名运行类似您的业务的客户执行此操作。这些是我们看到有效且有效地工作的活动和流程 - 为什么要试图弄清楚如何自己做出不同的方式？您的实力和市场优势正在制定投资决策和构建投资组合。我们的实力基于车辆和资产类别不可知的平台，以处理损害您对核心实力的关注的所有事情。“

How important is customization to managers?

We could not have grown our business without customizable solutions. “Any color as long as it’s black” doesn’t work well in the alts space. Most of our clients want a customizable look and feel, just like the way they interact with their investors. They feel strongly about the format and look of the reports they have developed internally to manage their day-to-day business, and they want to maintain or improve upon that, not be forced to accept something that’s rigid and one-size-fits-all. We’ve built out our solutions flexibly enough to allow for that. And having been at this for decades, our capabilities have evolved in step with industry tech and business intelligence tools. There are business intelligence tools that allow us to help managers deliver deeper details and information to their clients in customizable way, too. Due to the length of time we’ve been servicing this market and the 500-plus clients we work with, we have a lot of experience when it comes to best practices, and I think our clients appreciate and perceive a strong benefit when we share our perspective. It doesn’t mean we’re going to dictate to them, or not work with them to do what they know helps them stand out in the market, but they do see a value in our broad perspective.

What does a more advanced level of customization look like?

允许我使用一个例子。API - 应用程序编程接口 - 是我们的内部系统在SEI彼此交谈的方式。如果他们希望创建自己的独特和自定义的Web应用程序或内部构建的交易系统，我们认为在我们的客户中可能存在一些含量的价值。它们可以利用我们在内部使用的相同类型的连接点，或者我们为其他客户端使用。为杠杆的客户提供无限的灵活性和自定义 - 它仍然相对较新，在我们所有客户群中的实施阶段，但它得到了很好的收到。我们还看到了我们自己和第三方之间的一些有趣的联系，因此也可以开放。

With all the capabilities we’ve been discussing, how do you think the investment firm of the future will take shape?

我们已经讨论过的一切都是支持的技术gy, so I think the investment firm of the future will see people doing increasingly higher value work. If you can reduce the time people spend reconciling information from one system to the next, or one source to the next, and instead just manage exceptions, you’ve changed their workday and the type of work that they can do. That applies to someone in the investor servicing group for an alternative fund manager, too. If they’re spending less time reading and verifying information in a sub doc, or typing it into a system, or creating a report to send to an investor, and more time learning about investors’ proclivities and behavior, you’re really changing their job. You’re empowering them to do higher level analysis and make higher level decisions.

One thing we’ve noticed over time is that our platform grows and expands as investment strategies, capabilities, and market environments do the same. As we come out of the Covid-19 crisis, we will likely see some interesting things that change how investors invest, and what they’re investing in. There will probably be more innovation on both the investment side and the processing side around private equity, private debt, real estate, and other alternatives. Leveraging operational and technological flexibility will be critical, for sure.

了解更多关于一个SEI的订单处理经理d investor document tracking.

A forward-looking report⁸from PwC written in 2015 anticipated what the alternative asset management landscape would look like in 2020, and had this to say: “By 2020 … leading alternative firms will have laid the necessary plumbing, and accessing data across their organizations will be as natural as turning on a tap.”

This was a bold projection when, according to another report⁹from roughly the same time, “Data management has also proven to be a vexing challenge for many firms. One out of three LPs now expect GPs to provide for data mapping into their portfolio monitoring systems.”

Effective data management relies heavily on technology, which in itself is ever improving. Keeping up can be costly, and even for larger firms with deep pockets, that can be a challenge. And if LP expectations back in 2015 were “vexing,” a 2019¹⁰survey showed how much so by revealing that only 1 in 10 asset owners were willing to pay more for managers that use big data in their investment research and idea generation (as opposed to managers that do not use big data for same). If that doesn’t vex managers, this certainly will: in response to the same question, 10% of investors said they expected to pay less.

GPs up their reporting game – sort of

如前所述,机构投资者期望n亚博赞助欧冠ew levels of transparency from traditionally opaque GPs, particularly in performance attribution and operating expenses. Reporting frequency can vary significantly by asset type, and the lack of standardization can make it challenging for firms moving into a new asset class. According to one 2017 study, monthly reporting is standard among hedge funds, although a small number (1 in 10) provide weekly reports. Quarterly reporting is much more common for private equity, private debt, and real estate funds. Infrastructure investments tend to produce the least frequent reports. For them, quarterly is standard, but one out of five infrastructure managers only offer annual reporting.¹¹

Perhaps the necessity to meet investor expectations on reporting is in the eye of the manager. Only 6% of hedge funds in one study¹²增强投资者报告中列出three strategic priorities for the firm. Same study, same question, a much larger 21% of private equity firms said it was a top three strategic priority. As a more “traditional” and liquid alternative product, hedge funds possibly feel they have sufficiently addressed reporting as they’ve been answering questions about it for a longer period of time.

Many firms are moving beyond periodic reports by offering some combination of customization and online access. For example, tailored reports were offered by approximately two out of three alternative managers in 2016¹³and in a more recent survey the top five types of custom reports were: one-off bespoke reporting upon request; risk and compliance; full position level transparency; open protocol; and, standard reports in tailored formats.

With more resources and a higher percentage of institutional investors, larger and more diversified firms are more likely to offer customizations than their smaller competitors. Online account access is still far from universal, and is more commonly offered by larger firms, particularly those managing multiple asset classes.¹⁴

Attuning to customization

Customization is almost surely central to the future of alternatives. More than seven out of every 10 firms plan to offer customized investment vehicles, with many planning to launch co-investment vehicles, separately managed accounts, or other structures.¹⁵The abundance of investment vehicles – customized or standard – is likely to test the personnel, processes, and profitability at many firms. Outsourcing relationships will become more critical and investments in technology internally will need to be judicious.

When large numbers of institutional investors began to take up alternative investments, alternative managers could have been forgiven for believing it would be business as usual – just more of it. Even investors themselves might have initially been tolerant of the opaque goings-on at hedge funds and private equity shops – after all, investors were primarily looking for investment expertise and performance. All of that changed, however, with the global financial crisis in the first decade of this century, and the resultant regulatory response.

Once investors could see behind the curtain, their expectations rose. Investment expertise from GPs was still prized – but the “nice to have” amenities of the investor experience became more of a demand. In short, GPs continue to experience an investor-driven shift in how their value proposition is defined. Here’s a short list of key focus points for alternative managers as they consider the benefits of improved operational excellence.

• Broadly diversified managers and specialist GPs alike must understand that their operational capabilities form a core part of their value proposition.
• 最终，资产管理人员必须确定他们是否可以通过精简和技术支持的投资者经验来提高投资专业知识。
• SEI交易等平台使工作流程和流程的无缝变化能够适应不断发展的法律和监管环境和运营要求。他们还通过最大限度地减少与私人基金投资相关的手动车载任务，显着改善和简化投资者的船上体验，同时减少错误来提高投资者体验。
• The ability to embrace big data, robotics, and AI is becoming increasingly important, and in some instances, is a core requirement for managers to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded field.
• The talent search at asset managers will evolve to include more diverse skill sets and backgrounds to help firms transition toward priorities being driven by product proliferation, increased data analytics, as well as implementation of new technology throughout organizations.
• Convergence in alternatives is an old trend at this point, but its main knock-on effect remains – firms that make up the alternatives community now compete not only against each other, but also versus traditional (and often very low-fee) long-only products and solutions.
• Alternative managers have not been as quick as their long-only counterparts to outsource various aspects of their businesses, but this is changing as their operations become more complex and investor expectations rise. Fund accounting and administration are two of the most commonly outsourced functions.
• 各种其他后台和中间办公功能也正在通过大量公司外包，包括法规遵从性，数据管理，贸易和解等。三家公司差不多是投资者报告的三家公司。
• As businesses become more complex, it will become increasingly critical that operations run on flexible, integrated platforms that focus on investor outcomes rather than the underlying technology.
• Systems will need to be capable of handling closed-end and commitment-based fund structures alongside more liquid portfolios. Listed securities and syndicated loans from around the world need to be accommodated alongside traditional assets.
• Full data transparency will increasingly be the norm, with multiple systems being able to talk to one another so managers can provide insights across asset classes, structures and vehicles. More sophisticated infrastructure will also enable multi-strategy funds to customize their risk exposures.

Transform your organization by learning more about how to improve the investor experience.

了解更多关于一个SEI的订单处理经理d investor document tracking.

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1. 亚博赞助欧冠2020年3月，机构投资者分配器英特尔调查
2. Preqin Investor Outlook: Alternative Investments H1 2020
3. 是2019年全球另类基金调查
4. 2017年SEI / Preqin LP调查
5. EY 2018 Global Alternative Fund Survey
6. Deutsche Bank’s 18th Annual Alternative Investment Survey, 2020
7. Going the Distance: The Expanding Lifecycles of Private Equity Funds, Pepper Hamilton LLP, 2017
8. 替代资产管理2020：快进至中心舞台，2015年，普拉斯省
9. 2016 SEI Private Equity Survey
10. 是2019年全球另类基金调查
11. 2017 SEI/Preqin GP Survey
12. 是2019年全球另类基金调查
13. 2017 SEI/Preqin GP Survey
14. 2017 SEI/Preqin GP Survey
15. 2017 SEI/Preqin GP Survey