Alter Domus assets swell to $1trn with acquisition

Alter Domus has announced the acquisition of Strata Fund Solutions, a Utah-based fund services provider, bringing the firm’s global presence to over $1 trillion in assets under administration and putting among the top three largest private asset servicers for US alternative asset managers.

Although informal talks between Strata and Alter Domus began in 2018, the growth Strata experienced over the last few years forced to firm to seek further scale with more urgency.

That’s what this transaction provides, both for Strata and Alter Domus, says Jared Broadbent, founder and chief executive of Strata. “From the perspective we see, this just brings additional scale and penetration in the US market,” says Broadbent.

But combining the technology systems of two fund administrators can leave clients concerned about the immediate continuity in their services, as well as about the potential for changes to an existing offering.

“We anticipate no changes to technology, really only augmentation and additional integration [of Strata’s and Alter Domus’ systems] as we move forward,” Broadbent says.

How they mesh

Together, the group will be utilizing in-house platforms such as CorPro (for their front end), Agency360, Mailroom and Virtual Back Office, as well as third-party information processing engines such as Investran, eFront, Allvue and Yardi. Clients accustomed to Strata’s systems won’t notice much of a change, says Alter Domus chief executive, Doug Hart.

“We want to be clear that we’re not eliminating technology solutions,” says Hart. “The way we solve for that is with some common platforms that bring all the underlying systems together.”

One of the chief features of choosing a large administrator like Alter Domus is the firm’s ability to scale and leverage its global presence, and that goes for its tech systems as well. “One of the really cool things we felt Alter Domus had built over time is this client-facing portal experience that is attached on the back end to different accounting platforms,” Broadbent said.

If a client were in a specific jurisdiction and using a particular accounting platform that made the most sense for them, Alter Domus’s platform allows for that integration while keeping the front-end experience for the client cohesive across all client types and asset classes.

“While the engine that is being used might be different, depending on the jurisdiction or the things that are being involved, the front-end client experience with… CorPro is a fantastic interface for them to get at the data in a cohesive way, regardless of what the back end is doing,” Broadbent says.