Northern Trust has enhanced its Hedge Fund Monitor product with a series of new features designed to improve automation and straight-through processing, enabling Northern Trust's Funds of Hedge Funds (FoHF) clients across the globe to access performance, liquidity and compliance data throughout the day.

Automation updates to Northern Trust's Hedge Fund Monitor product enable Northern Trust clients to now enter multiple trades on a single screen, including multiple trades on a single portfolio and, significantly, to instruct a single trade and allocate it across multiple portfolios.

Subject to terms and conditions, this allows a client to switch hedge fund investments between multiple portfolios without necessarily having to declare each switch to the market. Northern Trust's registration process will allow clients to switch hedge fund investments without incurring difficulties with capacity such as lockups (the window of time in which investors of a hedge fund are not allowed to redeem or sell shares) and gates (a restriction placed on a hedge fund limiting the amount of withdrawals from the fund during a redemption period).

"Eliminating manual processing and enabling access to robust information are key aspirations for fund of hedge fund managers," says Ian Headon, Northern Trust's asset servicing product manager for alternative investments. "These latest enhancements from Northern Trust enable our clients across the globe to streamline manual entries, reduce operating overheads, and improve internal reporting."