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PE Front Office: Technology Solution for Alternative Investment Management

The Alternative Investment business is booming with deal volumes at an all-time high. Continued growth in this business has made the lives of Alternative Investment managers more hectic, compelling them to look out for technological solutions that can help optimize the investment operations.

PE Front Office is an end-to-end integrated solution designed to address the specific needs of the Alternative Investment industry. We got into a conversation with Ankur Agarwal (Co-Founder & CTO, PE Front Office) to learn more about this solution:

Tell us about PE Front Office and the background of the team.

PE Front Office is a comprehensive and integrated suite of products that have been developed with a focus on the front and middle office processes for alternative investment management. Our solutions include Deal Flow, Fundraising, Investment Management, Portfolio Monitoring, Investor Management, Fund Administration, and Investor Portal.

PE Front Office Team brings together a collective work experience of more than 70 years with a combination of IT Expertise, Private Equity Domain Knowledge, and Global Operations Experience.

What is the business problem that PE Front Office is trying to address? 

Alternate Asset Industry i.e., Private Equity, Venture Capital, Real Estate & Debt Funds, Distressed Debt Funds, Fund of Funds, and Family Offices, 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, analytics, etc. Interestingly, Alternate Asset Industry has invested a lot in technology companies, but they 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 solve the industry’s problems. There was a need for a simple and complete Industry-specific technology solution. Perfectly understanding this current need, we have created a simple, seamless, technological solution to take care of the Alternate Asset Industry requirements.

What does PE Front Office have in store for different market segments in the Alternative Asset Industry? 

Different fund types dealing in different market segments have slightly different priority expectations from the technology solutions provider. For example, 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 organization-specific monitoring and tracking of the investments made in different sectors.

The Venture Capital market segment is very prolific as they meet a lot of potential investees, resulting in hundreds of Deals, from various channels, 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.

For Debt Funds, while the number of deals to be evaluated may be low, the amount of data that needs to be captured, processed, and calculated to manage and track the portfolios is fairly high. PE Front Office solution with its Portfolio Management, Fund Management, and Reports and Analytics capabilities enables fund managers to run statistical analytics and pull-out different types of reports in a short time. PE Front Office offers capabilities to easily capture debt fund key parameters, such as default interest, accrued interest, arrears interest, and moratorium period, and generate and track an automated amortization schedule.

Fund of Funds need to monitor multiple funds and be on top of their game as an Investor too. To fulfil these unique requirements, our solution offers capabilities to manage the entire Fund of Fund ecosystem which includes setting up complex multilevel fund structures, tracking underlying investments in funds as well as portfolio companies, and reporting investment performance efficiently to the investors.

How does PE Front Office help enhance the productivity of the Alternate Asset firms?

Our feature-rich solution is equipped with productivity multipliers such as Outlook & Gmail Plugins, Google Drive & One Drive integration, Android & iOS Mobile Apps, and DocuSign Integration.

Another key feature is the built-in Reports & Analytics engine that offers 40+ out-of-the-box reports and is further augmented by Excel Add-in, designed to produce real-time custom reports.

Further, PE Front Office has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with an objective to onboard the end-users with minimal training so that they can easily understand and adopt the technology in their day-to-day business.

What is the USP of PE Front Office?

Time to go live! Our solution is Cost-effective, fast & responsive, and promises the shortest implementation cycle in the industry using Agile methodology.

PE Front Office solution has a flexible framework that easily allows customizing as per the customer’s specific functionality, at any given time. Our approach is to communicate in customer’s specific terminology, understand the business process, map it to the available functionality and customize the solution if needed. If needed, PE Front Office integrates easily with any third-party data information source system, making it the ideal solution.

Tell us about your customers and global presence.

Over the years, PE Front Office has expanded its presence covering different market segments and geographies delivering a solution for the Alternate Asset industry. Currently, PE Front Office has 85+ customers across 12 countries including the USA, Canada, UK, Italy, The Netherlands, Malta, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India.

Published in : VC Circle