Service providers have had a busy year as they move to meet demand from fund management clients for new technology and increased services.
Service providers have had a busy year as they move to meet demand from fund management clients for new technology and increased services.
Utilising data
Some service providers are seeing much of client demand revolving around data: more data, better access to data and more opportunities to utilise that data. FIS Global has seen investors asking GPs for more data and GPs asking the same from FIS.
“Ten years ago, data was very disparate with no real audit trail. We have got past that now: everyone has become operationally ready,” says Paul Landi, Product Strategy, Digital Investment Analytics at FIS.
There has also been a shift in the type of data required, with RepRisk seeing a demand for ESG data, a trend only exacerbated by Covid. “Covid-19 helped to elevate the ‘S’ in ESG, bringing to the fore issues like health and safety, employment conditions, and the topic of discrimination generally and of racism and racial inequality specifically.”
Risk and reward
Indeed, Covid has also highlighted the need for a robust risk management framework across the industry.
“Having a disciplined approach to risk and being able to execute on that plan efficiently was a differentiating factor for many of our clients over the past 18 months,” says Bryan Cohen, Managing Director, Head of US Client Coverage, at Validus Risk Management.
Covid has also accelerated one approach to risk management by driving firms to increase automation and end-to-end processing across their organisations, in order to mitigate risk from manual processing and disjointed legacy systems.
And as we emerge from Covid, George Ralph, Global Managing Director and CRO at RFA, believes that business needs will stay the same. “What is likely to change are processes – greater automation, reliance on cloud and AI, continued threats in cybersecurity and remote work.”
Talent management
One further issue that has emerged from Covid and its associated pressures is one of attracting and keeping key staff, a pressure that is impacting on the whole financial services industry and beyond.
Firms such as Jensen Partners are working to source and place the best candidates at PE firms around the world, while also addressing ESG issues such as diversity, equality and inclusion by its launch of a platform designed specifically to allow AIMs to quantify and qualify the intersectionality of race, class and gender across their workforce.
Looking for support
Fund administrators, such as UMB and Alter Domus, have seen an increasing number of PE fund managers looking to leverage the wider capabilities of fund administrators, with clients asking for more support with regulatory compliance, data standardisation and transferability, custody and treasury services, and loan servicing support among other functions.
Jill Calton, EVP, Executive Director Alternative Investments at UMB Fund Services, says: “Technology will also support the increasing demand for transparency and monitoring.”
And Tim Toska, Group Sector Head, Private Equity at Alter Domus concurs, saying: “Fund administrators like ourselves are now helping to accelerate the digitisation of our industry.”
As we move towards 2022, it seems that the industry’s reliance on tech-driven solutions will only increase further. 
