News

The long-only, Connecticut-based equities specialist with $3.8 billion under management will use Electra's Billing 3.0, formerly known as Quantum, for revenue workflow management and customized billing, including performance fees and complex fee schedules.

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets continue to be broadly used at asset management firms. New regulations, risk management concern, and technological advancements are leading buy-side companies to examine ways to lessen their dependencies on these ubiquitous, manual solutions.

The damage caused by banking scandals may have been minimized by an event-driven reconciliation solution, says Todd Sloan, senior vice president of reconciliation systems at Electra Information Systems.

2014 is slated to be the first real test year for a number of critical provisions of Dodd-Frank, and in Europe the AIFMD, EMIR and proposed banking union will only add to that overhead. No one including the regulators themselves are fully aware of how all of this will play out.

The search for alpha is leading even traditional asset managers into alternative investments, greatly increasingly the complexity of the reconciliation process. Manual processes and Excel-based models no longer are sufficient, says Electra’s Ian Danic.

Electra has entered into an alliance with Eagle Investment Systems that will enable Eagle clients to use Electra’s assistance for data collection, fee billing and trade notification. The new alliance builds upon long-standing working relationship between the vendors.

Electra CEO John Landry writes that faced with tough mandates from regulators and investors, hedge funds must adopt automated reconciliation systems to improve their operations, mitigate risk and reduce costs.

In order to improve its reconciliations capabilities, Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund AQR Capital decided it needed to replace its legacy, largely manual-process-heavy reconciliation system, and turned to Electra Information Systems.

The Waters Technology editor asserts it’s unacceptable that up to 80 percent of reconciliations at major financial institutions still take place through the use of manually intensive, spreadsheet-based platforms and highlights how Electra automated this process for AQR Capital.

Electra CEO John Landry discusses how regulatory mandates and the increased flow of institutional money into hedge funds have created a growing demand for automated reconciliation systems from the asset management community. This will force hedge fund to compete for institutional assets on a playing field that’s new to them.