Eze Castle Integration

The alternative investment industry is faced with the continued challenge to maintain and improve its operational and technology infrastructure in order to stay on top of impending regulations and growing investor demands. Eze Castle Integration tasked itself with surveying a subset of the alternative investment community as a means to achieve greater insight into the industry – including assessing the various software and hardware solutions, applications, and systems currently being employed by firms today.

The study was completed in the second half of 2010 and was targeted at a variety of alternative investment firms on the buy side, including hedge funds, funds of hedge funds, private equity firms, and venture capital firms. Eze Castle Integration interviewed and surveyed more than 200 firms and analysed the data, which is presented in the report. What follows is an excerpt from the Hedge Fund Operations & Technology Benchmark Study.

Respondent profile
There were 223 firms surveyed for this study, and more than half (56%) of those firms reported their assets under management to be less than $250 million. Of the remaining 44%, 17% indicated they had assets between $250 million and $750 million, while 27% reported they had AUM of greater than $750 million. These results are consistent with what we are hearing throughout the industry – while there clearly remain many large firms across the alternative investment landscape, there also continues to be an increase in the number of smaller firms coming onto the scene, particularly post-Madoff.

From a geographical perspective, the majority of survey respondents (76%) indicated their firms were solely based in the United States; only 24% of firms reported that they had an international office location. In accordance, 76% of firms also reported they only had one office location.