Tech & Evolving World of Alternative Asset Management!

Deal Management 2.0 In the previous post we had mentioned the challenges that Asset Managers Face as they reach out for the most lucrative deals in the market. The best asset managers are using deep learning technology as a differentiator for tracking, analyzing, and researching deals that they have in their pipelines. Pepper is intimately working with some of the leading deal makers to help them make better deal decisions. In this blog we provide a sampling of the some of the deal solutions that we are helping build for these managers.  Dashboards that provide an overview of the Deal pipeline, providing a clear summary of all the deals, the various stages, the total size, expected close dates, strategies, partners being the critical parameters. This provides senior managers with a quick view of the current status of the pipeline and focuses their energies on the most critical tasks of managing this existing portfolio. From these dashboards the manager can do a deep di...

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 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...

Alternative asset manager  be it a Private equity manager or a hedge fund manager or say a Family Office manager ,  has needs which are different from the software solutions currently available on the market. Where alternative asset manager needs a 360 view of his portfolio, his functionaries for example the accountant  has a more pointed problems at hand  he is only interested in tracking  the cash flows,  assigning costs to individual transactions etc which is limited to an area of the business accounts. The software solutions deal with just specific aspect of the business or are "point solutions". This leads to a huge gap between what is needed and what is available for the alternative asset managers today. An asset manager is managing different assets under his fund and has varied needs of data. A complex asset manager like a Blackstone or Carlyle of today would be managing a Private equity fund, a Credit fund, Real Estate Fund, a Distressed ...

Alternative Asset Managers have many challenges today. Alternative Asset Management market is not the same anymore as what it used to be say 2 decades back. Everything around us have changed drastically, but unfortunately and for a strange reason the tools and software are the same which were created then. The reason to this is that the software created then had huge costs and are still in the process of recovering the cost of creation, also these solutions have pretty high cost of installation, management, and maintenance. This makes it almost impossible for the startup and mid-market asset managers to even think of these as they have just started and have only limited funds to manage their show. So technology is the last thing on the minds of these mid-market private equity managers to invest in. Even for the big asset managers the problems with technology are many. The solutions which they are using or are currently available in the market are mostly point solutions and there i...

Alternative Asset Management industry is in for a disruption now, tech adoption has been poor as compared to other industries like Media, Commerce etc where they have seen a major difference in the way the industry used to operate. We are either stuck with those complex ERP solutions designed way back in late 90's and early 2000's or just don't have any solutions other than relying on the spreed sheets. The Tech solutions which were conceptualized 2 decades back are  mostly point solutions and have a huge cost associated with that technology. So where the large Asset Managers despite their investments cannot have the holistic view of their business the startup managers and the mid-market Asset Managers cannot even think of such a technology because of the huge investments required. Watch Founder and CEO of On Pepper, Mr. Pulak Sinha talk about it and the reason to why we exist!