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Online due diligence platform boosts efficiency

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AlternativeSoft: Best Risk Management Software Provider – In the year since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, investors and managers have had to grapple with shifting due diligence processes to virtual platforms. This has driven innovation among service providers who sought to ensure their clients’ operations remained smooth.

One such example is AlternativeSoft. The firm has built a due diligence exchange software where the hedge funds and allocators can share due diligence questionnaires, returns for their own investment series, exposures by geographies / sectors, fund fact sheets and investment memorandum in a web format.

Launched in March 2021, the firm’s Due Diligence Exchange (DD-x) platform provides AlternativeSoft’s clients with all the tools they need to run due diligence in a fraction of the time. While some investors have tools to help carry out these activities, due diligence still involves repetition and a lot of manual work. 

The process is made more complicated by the fact that there can be many people involved as professionals from research, compliance, diversity, risk and other financial factors are usually associated with due diligence. Further, individuals have their own way of working, meaning results can be inconsistent, unreliable and prone to error.

This new web platform seeks to solve this by providing a central point of contact for communication between hedge funds and its investors involved in the due diligence, 

Laurent Favre, CEO of AlternativeSoft comments: “We think that hedge funds and private equity funds’ due diligence will be centralised. This notion is what drove us to build this piece of web software. There are only another three existing software on the market offering such a service.”

The software digitises, automates and streamlines the entire process for both investors and hedge funds. Instead of a pile of convoluted paperwork, questionnaires and forms, This new web platform provides a single due diligence AIMA questionnaire in a digital format. Dates of when the questionnaire was sent, received, updated and how much is filled are recorded. 

“With all questionnaires centralised and accessible by authorised stakeholders in this way, the entire process becomes much more efficient and faster to complete for the hedge funds,” Favre highlights.

The firm is on a growth trajectory and, in 2020, hired 20 new developers. Favre outlines the firm is focusing less on quantitative models and more on assisting and supporting the cooperation between hedge funds and its investors.

“We are aiming to double the number of allocator clients we have and to have 500 hedge funds using our new software in order to share documents and questionnaires with their investors at the end of 2021,” he stresses.

With over USD1.5 trillion in client assets under management, AlternativeSoft’s clients include some of the world’s largest pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, fund of funds and wealth managers such as BNP, Credit Suisse, Singapore, Canada, Alliance Bernstein, Aberdeen, Societe Generale, Unigestion, Vontobel, Raiffeisen, Novartis, Roche. These clients use AlternativeSoft’s solutions to create a unique funds universe and perform complex quantitative analysis to identify top-performing funds, collect due diligence documents and store them and subsequently build, optimise, paper trades and manage portfolios. 


Laurent Favre, CEO, AlternativeSoft
Laurent Favre founded AlternativeSoft after four years at UBS Wealth Management where he was head of tactical asset allocation. At UBS, he spear-headed and implemented the investment strategies for USD110 billion of private client assets, including USD30 billion in Mutual Funds and also was involved in the construction of the first USD6 billion UBS Wealth Management Fund of Hedge Funds. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA in finance, both from the University of Lausanne and was a professor of economics and mathematics for two years in Lausanne, Switzerland. His interests include skiing, sports and happy clients.

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