2013 was a year of key milestones for Advent’s Geneva product: the leading fund accounting engine within the hedge fund industry. First, version 10 of Advent’s Geneva was rolled out, with over 100 new features added to the three versions of the product. Second, more than 300 clients now use Geneva. And third, it passed USD100m in revenue since it was first introduced to the market.
“2013 was a great year for Geneva, both from a product and business perspective. From a product perspective we had our first set of clients adopt a couple of new modules. One is a hybrid private equity module and one is a fund-of-funds module,” explains Robert Roley (pictured), Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Advent.
Among Advent’s many products, Geneva still takes primary focus to ensure that Advent can support any type of fund, any type of fund strategy, in any region of the world.
“For example, we added new investment types for Brazilian fixed income to expand our Latin American client base. With respect to regulation, we’ve added capabilities within Geneva to track Legal Entity Identifications (LEIs) and expand some of our third party integration with providers to allow our clients to comply with the likes of Form PF, FATCA, etc. Most of the over 100 enhancements we made last year were within the main Geneva accounting engine,” says Roley.
To help build closer collaboration with its clients and better understand their evolving needs, 2013 also saw the roll out of Advent Direct Community, a module that sits within the Advent Direct cloud platform to allow clients to share new ideas and support each other.
“The best ideas tend to rise to the surface, which our team can then address (and potentially develop further). A lot of what we do is listen openly to our clients and then react accordingly,” adds Roley.
This is illustrated by the early focus that Advent placed on FATCA regulation. A lot of the added capability to track information on a manager’s US investors and perform additional operational tasks to stay compliant was done in 2012 and as Roley notes: “As FATCA has been pushed back a little bit it’s helped our clients get ahead of the curve.”
The trend of hedge fund managers launching more private equity-like fund structures (hybrid funds) prompted Advent to roll out the first version of its hybrid product last year.
“Previously we might have had clients running one system (e.g. Geneva) for their hedge funds and another system for their private equity funds. When lines blur between those two businesses you can’t do that anymore. We built out this capability where managers can now run all of their funds, including these hybrid fund structures, on one system rather than having to assemble a patchwork of multiple systems.
“Our solution gives managers best-in-class accounting capabilities coupled with support for multiple fund types via Geneva World Investor,” explains Roley.
It’s this willingness to evolve not only the functionality of well established products like Geneva but bring new products to market that encapsulates why Advent has enjoyed such widespread adoption over the years.
On winning the award Roley comments: “The Hedgeweek Awards mean a lot to us because it’s the readers and ultimately our clients who are making their voices heard.”