Citco Tudor Platform Takes Fund Administration to

March 31, 2003 at 07:00 PM
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NEW YORK (HedgeWorld.com)–In a strategic move that highlights a growing competitiveness in the hedge fund administration industry, Citco is offering a new suite of services to fund clients via a technology platform developed in conjunction with the Greenwich, Conn.-based money management giant Tudor Investment Corp.

"The idea was to bring hedge fund administration to the next level," said William Keunen, director of Citco Fund Services. "We wanted to offer hedge fund managers services with a more integrated approach. In addition to the more traditional administration services, we'll be offering a package that allows wider mid- and back-office support."

The platform is the outgrowth of a technological infrastructure built by Tudor, which Citco provides administration and back-office services for, according to Mr. Keunen.

Citco has been licensed as the exclusive distributor of the software developed by Tudor to provide back-office support to hedge funds.

"What this reflects is really an evolutionary change in the administration business," Mr. Keunen said. "By integrating different administration functions under a single umbrella, what you are doing is allowing fund managers a lot more operational efficiency. In addition to order entry and those types of functionalities, under this model you can include risk management tools and the like."

The Citco Tudor software allows fund managers to track vital information in real time, integrated with the administrator's database.

And operational efficiency is on the minds of many hedge fund managers these days considering that money is flooding into the industry at a rapid rate, which means the opportunities and administrative burdens are growing simultaneously for managers of alternative investment vehicles.

"The hedge fund industry is growing at a very rapid rate," Mr. Keunen said. "And, part of the greater operational efficiency we are talking about allows hedge fund managers to offer more transparency and better risk management, which is something important to the types of institutional investors that are becoming more active in this area."

Citco Fund Services currently administers to about 1,000 hedge funds with combined assets of $100 billion.

But Citco isn't without competition. Last week, the BISYS Group Inc. acquired the Hemisphere Group, a hedge fund administrator catering to some 200 individual asset managers with a combined $50 billion in hedge funds. (Previous HedgeWorld Story) The Hemisphere deal is expected to allow the administration group to tap a growing number of institutional investors and mutual fund companies that are served by BISYS and beginning to launch hedge funds of their own.

But the prospect of increased competition is, in many ways, only a secondary theme these days, considering the overall expansion of the industry.

"We're seeing an incredible number of new fund startups and of course existing funds are experiencing stronger inflows from new investors," Mr. Keunen said. "Both parts of that equation are important to us. And, our platform is such that it is designed to be highly scalable to meet the demands of fund managers at these different stages."

"In that respect, it's a good time for the industry and a good time for us," he said.

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