Digital Assets Report

Newsletter

Like this article?

Sign up to our free newsletter

ASPN Solutions – Best Fund Accounting & Reporting Systems

Related Topics

ASPN Solutions (The Alternative Share Private Network “ASPN”) is a comprehensive front, middle, and back office solution designed to empower institutional investors to build, execute and monitor multi-manager hedge fund portfolios. Developed within Protégé Partners, a FoHF manager that invests in emerging managers and seeds new managers, and the same team that built Altvest, the first internet hedge fund database, ASPN is the first end-to-end solution that can run on any device or operating system.

Dr Ken Akoundi (pictured), one of the founders of RiskMetrics and most recently the Global Markets head of the McKinsey spinoff, Opera Solutions, joined ASPN Solutions last year to bring ASPN to institutional investors. Akoundi comments: “Institutional investors require numerous internal processes to manage hedge funds across the asset allocation, risk management, operational due diligence, and accounting processes. ASPN eliminates the need for a number of systems by serving as the single end-to-end solution for alternative investment teams to run all of their processes.”

In addition to being a total end-to-end solution, ASPN allows institutions to pool resources and collaborate with one another to obtain research and increase buying power. The current trend in the industry is to invest directly with hedge funds, and ASPN allows investors to do so in a cost-efficient manner. 

“Assuming that each of the top 100 institutions has two internal hedge fund researchers, and assuming that they agree to collaborate, the pool of 200 researchers is larger than any other pool of researchers you’ll find in the industry,” states Akoundi. 

Protégé Partners was the initial client of ASPN Solutions. “We are currently in dialogues with over 100 institutions, which we believe confirms the desire to collaborate and the need for such a holistic system,” says Akoundi.

On an ongoing basis, ASPN has unveiled numerous enhancements. Most recently, it has added private equity capabilities. A productivity dashboard to enable CIOs to monitor the productivity of their research teams is an upcoming enhancement. “For example, a CIO might want the team to focus on Asian event-driven managers and if the productivity report shows that the majority of the meetings were in Europe, the CIO may want to raise questions. They can monitor how many manager meeting notes were recorded over any time period to make sure the productivity of the team is focused accordingly,” says Akoundi. “In addition, the CIO can see how well-connected a team is within the ASPN collaborative sharing centre.”

ASPN technology is customisable to the needs of the individual institution, whether it is creating a customisable screen or due diligence questionnaire, or the implementation of a bespoke due diligence process.

“Lastly, we will be introducing ASPN Communicator in the near future; this comes directly from conversations we’ve had with CIOs. When using Google to research risk parity, for example, the first five results are always advertisements from the largest players in the industry, rather than the most relevant pieces of information. What we’ve done is to create an essential research repository that we monitor, clean and tag so that institutional investors can search for relevant articles. 

“We started with what we thought were the top 100 financial industry articles of all time. We’ll now let the market decide how we should build out the repository moving forward,” confirms Akoundi.

Like this article? Sign up to our free newsletter

Most Popular

Further Reading

Featured