FIS is a global financial services technology company, with a focus on technology, consulting and outsourcing solutions. FIS serves more than 20,000 clients in over 130 countries and employs more than 55,000 people worldwide. It is a Fortune 500 company and is a member of Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
The FIS Investment Operations suite is designed specifically for alternative investment managers to support middle and back office functionality to enable the precise tracking of fund performance with a comprehensive general ledger for reporting. Moreover, the system empowers fund administrators to better help their end clients achieve their goals in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, turning commoditised services into a premium proposition.
FIS’s systems provide out-of-the-box connections to various market solutions for data dissemination including: market data, corporate actions, order management and investor servicing. “A second important feature is a comprehensive cross-asset application for high volume processing for fast reporting on large data sets. In addition, our systems support fast implementation times and easy upgrades, which helps clients to reduce their technology footprint for a lower cost of ownership,” explains Tony Chung (pictured) Global Head of Product Strategy, Alternatives, FIS.
Chung says that FIS’s core business is to create best-in-breed software solutions, not that it is critical for fund administrators to have a “proven, trusted vendor that focuses on the changing investment strategy landscape and can provide a scalable, secure platform to connect to various data sources and other mission critical systems”.
Certainly one of the benchmark criteria for any serious fund administrator is to provide alternative fund managers, regardless of strategy, with highly detailed data in a timely manner.
“FIS is committed to supporting fund administrators in differentiating their business models while reducing operational cost,” asserts Chung. “This is key to providing hedge fund managers the support needed to remain competitive with fees and open to various investment strategies.”
One example of the blurring of lines between hedge and PE is that some PE managers are evolving their investment strategies by moving more into liquid short-term opportunities, particularly in credit. “As a result,” says Chung, “we’ve leveraged the comprehensive reporting and accounting data from our VPM solution to integrate seamlessly to FIS’s best-of-breed investor servicing platform for closed-ended fund structures; Investran.
“This will result in operational efficiencies for credit funds rather than tracking offline in spreadsheets and manually loading into desperate systems.”
VPM is highly effective at simplifying the accounting and reporting process for bank debt strategies, including the ability to track interest on non-performing loans and calculate delayed compensation and cost of carry. FIS’s capabilities extend across multiple disciplines, including collateral management, derivatives processing (Front Arena), compliance (FIS™ Protegent), investment accounting (InvestOne), as well as a performance measurement software module to improve the investment decision-making process.
Chung says that currently, FIS’s fund accounting solution is focusing its R&D efforts in solution suites, “by which solutions across the FIS ecosystem are directly and deliberately connected in a standard and seamless manner”.
“Investments are underway building best-of-breed solutions focused on private credit markets, emerging fund managers as well as established managers. We have also begun an initiative around AI, using robotics process automation (RPA) to process limited partner notices in the private equity space,” confirms Chung. n
