Friday: Meeting LP demands ‘without hiring an army’

Find out how technology can help the fund admin space as investors in private equity funds become more sophisticated.

This Friday we’re talking about fund administration. As part of its Fund Administration Special, our sister publication Private Equity International released two in-depth articles on the current state and future of fund administration in private equity as investors start to demand more from general partners.

“Investors in private equity funds are becoming more sophisticated,” Melanie Cohen of Apex Fund Services tells PEI. “They want to drill down, they want detail, they want more look-through reporting. We need to provide that without hiring an army of people, and technology is responding.”

Scott Kraemer, a managing director at Vistra, says the biggest tech demands are focused on the availability of data, as opposed to simple reporting. Emerging technologies such as AI are still in the early stages as far as integration into the fund administration space, but as Sam Metland of Citco Fund Services points out, there have been some strong use cases for machine learning.

“In the [anti-money-laundering] area, large administrators receive hundreds of scanned passports every day, for example,” he tells PEI in an article charting the top 10 trends in fund admin. “There is a tool being shown to the market that learns the standard features and layouts of the variety of passports around the world and then can alert humans to any that seem odd. It can also extract the required data from the scan more efficiently and accurately than humans.”

This email was prepared by Brian Bonilla.