Entrepreneur Shane Brett (pictured) is CEO of hedge fund consultancy Global Perspectives and co-founder of FinTech startup, GECKO.
Entrepreneur Shane Brett (pictured) is CEO of hedge fund consultancy Global Perspectives and co-founder of FinTech startup, GECKO. Originally designed as a programme management solution to help him project manage his own extensive consultancy business, the latest version of GECKO is ‘GECKO Governance’, specifically aimed at hedge fund managers and fund service providers, to enable them to track all the governance tasks they need to complete for their funds.
"We started to talk to hedge fund companies who wanted a new version which tracked compliance and investment manager checks,” Brett says. Working together with fund governance firms, his team created a solution that offers a detailed compliance trail to show to senior managers, regulators and investors.
“Some fund governance companies have offices in many countries around the world and they need a system that enables companies to do fund reviews, manage their fiduciary oversight and keep all their tasks and documents in the same application to enable them to keep everything in the diary,” Brett explains. The system wraps around Google Docs or Microsoft Office.
GECKO Governance is based on a dashboard showing every fund with a progress bar for each of them. “As the work on each fund is completed the fund bar goes green and is updated in real-time. Users can see at a glance which fund is falling behind and which are on schedule” Brett explains. “Everyone can see very clearly how their check processes are being done and if any one of those tasks is not done by the due date, the bar goes red.”
“We have built in a calendar which shows the people who are working on the fund and all the tasks assigned to them so you can see immediately, in the next week these checks need to be completed, and if it has to be reallocated, it’s a simple drag and drop process and an e-mail goes out to inform everybody. We are trying to get away from huge e-mail trails.”
There are also text message alerts. “It’s designed to give you a top down view, so you don’t miss anything,” Brett says.
Read April's AlphaQ fund administration feature here for more quotes Global Perspectives' Shane Brett.
