The last 18 months have caused unprecedented operational challenges to all industries, and businesses have needed to adapt overnight or die. Fortunately for Opus, it has always operated using shared service teams and a ‘follow the sun’ global office model, and its proprietary technology allows the firm to switch production between multiple locations based on capacity and resources. 

During the challenging last 18 months, Investcorp-Tages – this year’s winner of Best Seeding Platform – has been focused on how to continue best serving its clients. Lionel Erdely, Co-CEO and CIO at Investcorp-Tages, says: “At the height of the crisis, we had a strong emphasis on capital preservation. As the situation normalised and improved, our investment team was focusing on identifying the new opportunities arising from the fluid environment.”  The company has also been able to leverage its larger and more global investment infrastructure, resulting from the integration of the Absolute Return Investment teams of Investcorp and Tages. “Our

With all of the changes and uncertainty over the last 18 months, Horseshoe Fund Services has remained laser-focused on its top priorities: its people and its clients.  Mike Gentile CAIA, FRM, Senior Vice President, Head of US Operations at Horseshoe, comments: “In order to ensure we could continue to deliver on these priorities, we implemented the necessary IT and infrastructure updates to accommodate our staff working from home, and ensured business continuity as we serviced our clients in a business-as-usual manner regardless of our work location.”  With the health and safety of its staff top of mind, and as the

The pandemic has proved a busy period for BNY Mellon’s HedgeMark, the winner of this year’s Best Managed Accounts Platform award, with 2020 and 2021 being two of its most active years for its managed client accounts.  Joshua Kestler, Global Head of HedgeMark, comments: “At the outset of the pandemic, allocators faced challenges putting capital to work given the inability to visit managers onsite. The protections associated with managed account structures, including control, improved governance and transparency, helped many of our clients overcome these challenges. The flexible and customised nature of managed account structures helped clients rapidly deploy capital to take

Why do you feel you were chosen as the winner of Best Risk Management Software? 

At the advent of the pandemic, Cowen Outsourced Trading acted quickly to move its global personnel to a remote working environment by mid-March. Its swift embrace of new technologies and its ability to utilise them across the business – trading, client support, new client onboarding, and capital introduction – enabled it to sustain service to existing clients, while extending its reach to new ones. “Our personnel had access to all capabilities and were able to service our clients seamlessly during the height of market volatility and volume,” says Jack Seibald, Global Co-Head of prime brokerage and outsourced trading at Cowen. 

This year’s winner of Hedgeweek’s Best US Audit Firm award for the second year running, CohnReznick, provider of integrated audit, tax and advisory services, keeps a keen eye on recent market trends to meet the needs of its alternative fund management clients.  Gary Berger, Partner and Northeast Practice Leader of CohnReznick’s Financial Services industry practice, says: “Successful alternative investment fund managers understand the market conditions and economic factors impacting their ability to raise capital, invest wisely and operate efficiently.”  CohnReznick is seeing more strategies around cryptocurrency or digital assets, but remains cautious on working with these due to regulatory concerns,

This year’s winner of Best Tax Advisory, Anchin, prides itself on focusing on the needs of its clients. Jeffrey Rosenthal, Leader of Anchin’s Financial Services Practice, says: “Tax is very important to many of our clients, but tax planning can be traumatic because of changes in the law. We’re very proactive when it comes to reaching out to our clients, and we educate them to recognise issues that might be important for them.”  Over the last year, Anchin has seen that with volatility comes opportunity and that managers have been able to take advantage of these swings in the market.

It has been almost a decade since regulators asserted jurisdiction over networks, and yet cyber risk continues to plague the alternative investment management (AIM) space. Services offered by those such as 2021’s Best Cybersecurity Provider, therefore, remain imperative.  Innovation John Araneo, Managing Director, Cybersecurity & General Counsel, believes that Align was chosen for this award for one reason: innovation. He says: “The Align Cybersecurity team really pioneered the concept of providing model cybersecurity programmes that are appropriately scaled for investment advisers. Align was the first firm to intentionally design a full-on cybersecurity advisory team as part of a managed IT service provider.”