eFront has launched new services and products for private equity limited partners, enabling them to focus on their most important activity, portfolio analysis, while saving time and effort.
The eFront LP Investor Portal (EIP) will accelerate the flow of quarterly data from general partners through the use of standardised Excel templates via a secure, internet-based portal. And, eFront Investor Services (EIS) collects data directly from GPs on behalf of investors and delivers it to their systems in ready-to-use formats. These new offerings will improve transparency, lower costs and enable faster, better-informed decision-making.
The alternative investment industry continues to cope with increasing amounts of data in various formats alongside the growing demand for transparency from both investors and regulators. LPs, especially those with investments across numerous funds, require reports from their GPs in formats tailored to their particular systems and analytical processes. However, GPs are not always able to provide data in the requested formats due to a variety of factors including incompatible technologies and resource limitations. LPs are obliged to collect, validate and convert data to suit their needs, which causes delays, increases costs and may create inaccuracies.
eFront’s new offerings for LPs, EIP and EIS, address these challenges. EIP enables LPs to communicate securely with each of their GPs and provide them with standardised Excel-based templates in which to return data to the LP. The templates are designed to meet the needs of nearly all LPs and enable them to proactively prescribe a common reporting standard to their GPs. AltExchange-compliant files or LP-specific templates can also be used. LPs benefit from accelerated and more reliable data processing, while GPs are relieved of the burden of creating templates to accommodate disparate LP requirements.
EIS is a natural complement to eFront’s solutions for LPs where eFront assumes the responsibility of collecting data directly from GPs, validating data, and either populating the standardised templates, or completing an LP’s custom templates. EIS will leverage the portal to send data to an LP organisation. These services relieve both GPs and LPs of the burden of data standardisation while ensuring timely delivery and accuracy.
Although EIS and the EIP may be used by any limited partner entity to save time and effort, an additional value is the capability to directly feed data into FrontInvest, eFront’s market-leading solution for LPs to manage and analyse their alternative investments.
“EIP and EIS are powerful solutions for solving the time-consuming and costly challenge of data reporting for both GPs and LPs,” says Olivier Dellenbach, eFront’s founder and CEO. “With these new products and services, LPs can obtain data in the format they desire without doing the collection and transformations themselves. eFront offers the efficiency and cost effectiveness that limited partners in the alternative investment industry have been seeking for a long time.”
