Novus Partners, a portfolio intelligence company servicing both asset capital allocators and hedge fund managers, has made significant updates to its platform as it relates to the ingestion and analysis of ‘deep’ portfolio data.
“As we continue to build on our long-term vision to become the ‘one’ platform for institutional investors, over the last 12 months we have made a series of updates to the Novus Platform that expand our portfolio intelligence capabilities; these updates enable our clients to better manage their portfolios through deeper intelligence, collaborative updates, and personalised dashboards,” says Andrea Gentilini, CEO of Novus.
These enhancements include a cash flow projection capability through the Novus “What-If Illiquids” tool, which provides institutional investors with a vital hypothetical analysis instrument to help plan future investments in private assets. The tool lets clients dynamically configure and model how cash flows and portfolio exposures are projected across all funds within a client’s portfolio. As a result of this analysis, investors can forecast their expected future exposures by sector, market cap, and geography.
These enhancements complement Novus’ existing liquidity analysis tool, which allows investors to model redemption terms associated with their ‘liquid’ funds. The two functionalities combined allow investors to properly model cash flow needs, and be on top of funding requirements for their entire portfolio.
These developments also allow for crucial portfolio stress testing. “Consider exogenous market events such as Covid-19, which created a shock in most investors’ portfolios. This liquidity analysis tool enables investors to determine how many days are required to redeem from each portfolio position in order – for example – to fund private market commitments. It also allows managers to comply with new ESMA regulations,” Gentilini adds.
Novus has seen notable growth in client acquisition and retention rates during the year-on-year period while it has continued to develop flexible high-quality data management and analysis tools, especially in illiquid investments. As part of its expanded product offerings for illiquid and private equity investments, Novus has also continued to build out its “Private Equity Suite,” which aligns with overall institutional demand for private markets that grew to USD7.4 trillion in 2020, with PE accounting for the largest growth of all private asset classes, according to McKinsey.
Consistent with its historical DNA of providing deep, position-level transparency for investors in liquid funds, Novus now provides position-level transparency in private assets. Whether you are investing in a portfolio of real estate, ventures, wine, art, horses, crypto-currencies or non-financial-tokens, Novus provides tools to ingest and represent position-level information alongside other traditional portions of an investor’s portfolio.
“All investors we work with want ‘one’ platform to represent and analyse all of their portfolio data. With the latest enhancements made in private assets, Novus has become just that. Compared to the competition, Novus excels at providing deep transparency on portfolio holdings. With mounting fiduciary obligations for institutional investors to be on top of and in control of their data these tools enable investors to comprehensively meet that need,” Gentilini says.
