Tech & Evolving World of Alternative Asset Management!

Data is the New Oil “Data is the New Oil” . Oil Powered Industrial revolution, transformed our lives adding a new dimension to the way we live in today’s world  Data is poised to power Information revolution and we are witnessing another transformation adding again a new dimension to humanity, redefining the way we are making decisions and the way we would make decisions in the times to come. Sounds good and fancy too! But how does it really relate to me as an alternative asset manager? The question is very pertinent and calls for a deliberation. Today data is produced at a feverish pace at an exponential rate of 4400% of what was being produced a decade back. This rate of rate of producing data too is growing exponentially and we would witness unimaginable amounts of data that is going to be produced. What we process today? Less than 3% of the total produced data!! This is huge gap and points to a big opportunity, just imagine if we could optimize the data capture and ...

As the alternative assets gather critical mass and readies to explode the Private Equity firms are into a phase of transformation. External factors are creating more competitive deal environment challenging & crumbling the traditional models of investment sourcing and execution. Internally it amounts to increased pressures & responsibilities on the GP’s of reporting more information and more often to the LP’s who are becoming more and more demanding on information sharing. Today the funds have become more complex and the LP’s are now seeing themselves in a greater role of involvement in the business and demand transparencies of much higher levels, asking for more live relevant data on demand and in time. Not to forget that data has a shelf life and its relevance short lived. There are reasons to this behavioral  transformation of LPs. Today investor can be LP in the fund & can also be co-investing into the asset along with the GPs directly, the line...

Alternative Asset Management and Technology It’s astonishing that the $30 trillion asset management industry still relies on 76% of its tasks on spreadsheets. Asset management, and technology, are natural partners, where the industry generates tremendous amounts of data, and technology of-course hopes to manage that data. With the growing demands of getting better returns, increased transparency and regulatory demands, there is an increased push towards better tools and technology solutions. In this series we take a look at some of the challenges of current players in the market. Legacy software’s approach to business - Legacy software’s were written in early 2000 addressing the challenges of simpler asset management needs, and very old technology. They were designed to be “point solution” for the alternative asset managers, addressing needs of wither just the accounting or risk or trade management but never a complete data platform. Cost of the technology – The eco...

Alternative Asset Managers with today's business complexities have a few perplexing choices to make to start manage their data intelligently. With limited “point solutions” as options, the choices for building a world class infrastructure for asset manager are difficult. Incredibly many of these solutions were created over two decades ago, for a very different industry. None of these point solutions provide a holistic 360 view of the business of asset management. With limited analytics, outdated user interfaces and zero interoperability they are a management nightmare. An asset manager often spends hours mashing up deal strategy information with valuation data and  cash flows  and combine those with investor data to get the return analytics he needs.  Its often said “Data is the New Oil”. Pepper is the new comprehensive, flexible, scalable cloud based platform for Alternative Asset Managers. Pepper enables the modern alternative asset managers make more intellig...