Several major private equity firms have formed a global industry alliance called the AltExchange Alliance.
The AltExchange Alliance has launched the private equity industry’s first comprehensive standard for data formats.
The common format defined by this new standard aims to transform the way general partners, limited partners, fund of funds and fund administrators share, aggregate and analyse data.
"The problem the industry has been facing for years is the ability to effectively process ever increasing volumes of data," says Johnny Randel (pictured), chief financial officer of StepStone and AltExchange founding member. "Firms have been spending considerable time and resources manually re-keying and reconciling information and less time analysing data. Having the transfer of data automated and having agreed upon industry-defined data standards will help address this significant inefficiency."
Organisations from around the world are members of AltExchange. The Alliance members have collaborated to define a detailed data format, enabling investors to streamline their workflows and analyse data more easily while reducing the fund manager’s workload to support individual requests for customised reports.
"We are often asked to provide varied levels of information to our investors," says Ed Brandman, chief information officer of KKR, and AltExchange founding member. "By adopting an industry standard, we can use a single format for all interested parties, enabling us to provide a more efficient and timely service for our investors. We encourage our investors to join the Alliance."
The data standard uses tailored XML taxonomies, an open standard, and spans many relevant elements including portfolio company financials, investor organisations and contacts, fund information, cash flows, capital accounts and more.
A unique aspect of the AltExchange data standard is the existence of a corresponding validation platform. Firms using the AltExchange standard can submit a data file to the validation engine for certification prior to distributing or consuming it.
