PE Front Office: Delivering Cost Effective and End-to-End Solution for Alternate Asset Industry
Ankur Agarwal, Co-Founder& CTO
According to a report, 60 percent of institutional investors invest in at least one alternative asset class. Alternate Asset Industry i.e. Private Equity, Venture Capital, Real Estate & Debt Funds, Distressed Debt Funds, Fund of Funds and Family Offices, simply put, provides alternatives to traditional ways of investing in the capital markets. These different fund types operate differently however, they do share a lot of common challenges e.g. instant and easy access to information, data security, compliance, advance reporting and analytics etc. Interestingly, Alternate Asset Industry has invested a lot in technology companies but they themselves have been hugely underserved because there were very few IT solutions offering end-to-end support to firms. Although, Alternate Asset Industry has been using MS Office(esp. MS Excel) and e-mail to aid its daily operations; this doesn’t salvage the industry of its problems. There is a need for simple and ccomplete Industry specific IT solution. Perfectly understanding this current need, PE Front Office created a simple, seamless, web-based solution to take care of the Alternate Asset Industry requirements.
Cost Effective Solution with End-to- End Functionality
The company devised a solution with a flexible framework which easily allows customizing as per the firm’s specific functionality, at any given time. Company’s approach is to communicate in firm’s specific terminology, understand its business process, map it to the available functionality and customize the solution if needed. The solution enhances work productivity with its end-to-end functionality and easy user interface, which makes it easy for the end users to understand and adopt the technology in their day to- day business.
PE Front Office, in the duration of three years has acquired clients across the globe with firms ranging from large PE/Debt/Real Estate funds who have upwards of 5+ Billion Dollars under management to smaller VC firms catering to the entire gambit of the Alternate Asset industry.
"PE Front Office has created a simple, seamless, web-based solution to take care of the Alternate Asset Industry requirements"
Specific Solution for different Market Segments
Different fund types dealing in different market segments have slightly different priority expectations from the technology solutions provider. For example, Venture Capital market segment is very prolific as they meet a lot of potential investees, resulting in hundreds of Deals to be evaluated every week. Hence they need a very strong CRM and Deal Pipeline to tap on the next big trend and PE Front Office is specifically designed to help the Venture Capital Firms with this. Debt Funds have very complicated workflow structures wherein the number of deals to be evaluated is less but the amount of data which need to be captured, processed and calculated to manage and track the portfolios is huge. PE Front Office solution with its Portfolio Management, Fund Management, and Reports and Analytics modules help Debt Fund managers run Statistical Analytics and pull out important Reports quickly, helping them monitor and track the portfolio of investees. Private Equity Firms invest more in growth stage companies. For this segment, on top of standard features, PE Front Office provides customizable MIS templates to provide for organization-specific monitoring and tracking of the large investments made in different sectors. The company’s solution thus helps with the end-to-end need of tracking, storing and reporting in the overall Alternate Asset Industry.
Further Expansion
Over the years,the company has expanded its presence covering different market segments and geographies delivering a solution for Alternate Asset industry. The solution is comfortably established in the markets which include India, Middle East and South East Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong) and UK. Now for the future, with its software, PE Front Office is all set to expand its horizons and achieve new milestones in the U.S and European markets.
"PE Front Office has created a simple, seamless, web-based solution to take care of the Alternate Asset Industry requirements"
Specific Solution for different Market Segments
Different fund types dealing in different market segments have slightly different priority expectations from the technology solutions provider. For example, Venture Capital market segment is very prolific as they meet a lot of potential investees, resulting in hundreds of Deals to be evaluated every week. Hence they need a very strong CRM and Deal Pipeline to tap on the next big trend and PE Front Office is specifically designed to help the Venture Capital Firms with this. Debt Funds have very complicated workflow structures wherein the number of deals to be evaluated is less but the amount of data which need to be captured, processed and calculated to manage and track the portfolios is huge. PE Front Office solution with its Portfolio Management, Fund Management, and Reports and Analytics modules help Debt Fund managers run Statistical Analytics and pull out important Reports quickly, helping them monitor and track the portfolio of investees. Private Equity Firms invest more in growth stage companies. For this segment, on top of standard features, PE Front Office provides customizable MIS templates to provide for organization-specific monitoring and tracking of the large investments made in different sectors. The company’s solution thus helps with the end-to-end need of tracking, storing and reporting in the overall Alternate Asset Industry.
Further Expansion
Over the years,the company has expanded its presence covering different market segments and geographies delivering a solution for Alternate Asset industry. The solution is comfortably established in the markets which include India, Middle East and South East Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong) and UK. Now for the future, with its software, PE Front Office is all set to expand its horizons and achieve new milestones in the U.S and European markets.
