Hedge Fund Awards 2015

Hedge Fund Awards 2015 www.acquisition-intl.com 43 Best Fund Administration Software: BasisPoint Pendo Systems Pendo has spent the last several years investing in the capital markets industry to bring to market the future state of the back office solution Pendo Systems was formed in 2007 after our collaborative team’s long career with back office record-keeping providers. We believed that the industry needed to reinvent the back office and focused on our industry’s inventory: global position data. We focused on the data from the bottom up providing for the first universal live back-office system globally. We focus on capital markets, in particular fund administrators, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies and family offices. As a small company we possess unique competitive advantages: 1) we are nimble 2) we are unencumbered by bureaucracy and legacy processes and 3) as a result we are responsive, flexible and can deliver cost effective solutions to provide our customers with instant global transparency. Our business is distinguished in many ways, but our passion resulted in providing the industry a new incumbent to focus on empowering and mone- tizing the most valuable data in the capital markets infrastructure: securities position data. We used the modern day tools available to people and lever- aged the thinking for modern day processing. Why can we go on Google (for example), type in a package code and track that package immediately, when an average package is touched nine times in a day? But in our industry, we are lucky to know the global exposure to our position in Google by the next day, and in most cases it’s weeks of aggregation. While watching the industry grow and create silos of position data either by jurisdiction; line of business or client segment, it needed a re-haul. Even Fund Administrators have different platforms for different lines of business. We offer our clients a centralized universe of the most valuable data in the enterprise, position data. Questions such as: what do I own? What is it worth? And what is my counter- party exposure? Can be answered: Now! Agnostic to line of business, agnostic to jurisdiction. And the distinguishing factor: all of the data is made available to our customer and therefore gives them competitive advantages with their customers. We release the data from being hostage in the back office. Think about it: the position data is the lowest common denominator in the financial eco system, but it’s being held together and processed with legacy systems supported by loads of people and pivot tables. Anything but auditable transparent data. First and foremost BasisPoint is “live” global position recordkeeping solution. As a result of this core function; we have the ability to provide data to critical systems for risk/compliance/ regulations in seconds. The universal database is a source of data to all departments and eliminates the reconciliation between systems. Result, our clients “know their customer”. The inherent design allows us to automate core features like cancel and rebooks. The design is such that we store all data by position / tax lot; and maintain un- limited amount of cost basses: GAAP; IFRS; Australian Tax; Canadian GAAP and STAT as a few examples. Just one transaction entry supports as many mirrored accounting bases as required. Such granularity is available all the time and no purging providing for a complete and constant “look through” The multi-current capabilities are broad providing at all times a minimum of three levels of currency. The flexibility in the design and the multi-entity structure provides the ability to manage multiple lines of business on a single platform – so the global view of assets is across the enterprise independent of the line of business (asset management, insurance, wealth management, etc.). All of this automation also eliminates a great deal of broken trades; as we are not batch, we are able to consistently on demand spot these issues before an overnight process, eliminating a lot of overnight reconciliation. But the big “wow” factor is our data agnostic processing eliminating different databases to be run in different jurisdictions. Each and every portfolio can be on its on date at the lowest level achieving a true global investment book of record (IBOR). What are the main problems in the global investment accounting system? How do you address these issues? To quote Albert Einstein: “if you can’t explain it simply; you don’t under- stand it well enough.” Try to imagine any modern industry in the Internet age without an effective inventory management system. That order you just placed on Amazon might show up tomorrow – or next month. The flight you booked a month ago might have seats available when you get to the airport – or maybe you’ll have to wait a day or two. Believe it or not, that pretty much describes the state of today’s current back office model. This industry has spent billions on a global financial network, created countless new asset classes and passed a nearly indecipherable web of regulations to manage it all. But even the largest and most sophisticated players do not have an immediate and aggregated view of securities inventory to know in the moment what they own, how much they own, or where the counterparty risk lies. For confirmation, just look at headlines from the “scandal” at MF Global or the J.P. Morgan “London Whale” episode. Or go back to 2008 and AIG – the epicentre of the financial crisis. Virtually every crisis of confidence in our financial markets has one common thread: lack of “position transparency”, which translates to lack of effective inventory management. Jamie Dimon – the CEO of J.P. Morgan – put it best in the wake of the London Whale debacle: “I want to see the positions!” The course is so clear and simple. But we recognize looking at rebuilding the infrastructure is a tall and risky order. Therefore our first goal is encouraging firms not to continue to compound the problem. At a minimum we hope to shift the paradigm, see firms start on boarding new business to a future state platform and we plan to become the standard. Our data centres are the best in the world and we can offer a non-intrusive way forward. We thank you for this honour. n E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.pendosystems.com/ Address: Montclair, NJ, USA Tel: +1 (973) 735 - 5788 Fact File Best Fund Administration Software: BasisPoint