Best for Emerging Market Alternative Asset Management With our hedge fund heritage and by staying true to our specialist fixed income roots, we pioneer new investment strategies using our broad range of sub-asset class expertise, with a focus on absolute returns and capital preservation. Best Liquidity Management Team - USA Our firm s success is driven by a client first culture. This is not a new approach for the business but rather the foundation as we strive to work closely with clients to exceed their expectations.
Best Global Due Diligence Firm 2015 Company: Castle Hall Alternatives Name: Christopher Addy Email: info@castlehallalternatives.com Web Address: castlehallalternatives.com Address: 1850 Panama, Suite 415 Brossard, QC Canada J4W 3C6 Telephone: +1-450-465-8880 Castle Hall Alternatives, a member of AIMA, is an award- winning Operational Due Diligence (ODD) firm helping global institutional investors, fund of funds, advisors, family offices and endowments identify and manage the business and operational risk of asset managers. With nearly 40 professionals dedicated exclusively to operational due diligence, Castle Hall deploys one of the industry s largest and most experienced due diligence teams. We spoke to them to find out more.
The investment and diversification merits of alternative investments for investors with long time horizons and significant pools of capital are well documented. The opportunities to seek superior return potential and/or reduced risk, volatility and correlation across an investment portfolio are coveted by institutional and private investors. Some of the challenges in allocating to alternatives include: Finding and gaining access to top managers Having the time and ability to understand the operating and investment structures and risks Having the time and ability to monitor changes in the strategies and managers With ongoing and increasing demand for such strategies, and in light of the various risks associated with investing in this space, comprehensive operational due diligence and ongoing monitoring are a necessity. Castle Hall s diligence services are driven by our next generation, online diligence architecture, OpsDiligence. With the recent launch of our OpsMonitor module, Castle Hall is working to take ODD beyond traditional, snapshot due diligence. OpsMonitor offers investors a modular, systematized and real time risk management platform: we call this Due Diligence 3.0. It is generally believed that the following aspects must be aligned in order to ensure that a manager and investment represent a proper fit for an investor: The investment thesis and historic performance meet the investor s objectives, risk tolerance, time horizon, and liquidity needs The client understands the core competencies of, or believes in the abilities of, the investment team to fulfil the investment thesis moving forward The investment team and operational staff and service providers must be high quality people or firms The manager must display a sound operational setup and processes and have a commitment to client service excellence Evaluating each of these aspects is the challenge of every investor and Castle Hall Alternatives is pleased to support investors in the evaluation and monitoring of operational risks. Castle Hall s OpsDiligence and OpsMonitor services provide investors with the means to overcome many of these obstacles. Recognizing that the ability to identify and monitor risk is paramount for our busy clients, we continue to focus on the importance of strengthening and simplifying the client s ability to identify and monitor operational risks in their portfolio. Evolving our unique online Dashboard and expanding the suite of information available to our clients has been a tremendous undertaking for our firm. Each of these developments is designed to improve the scope, simplicity and quality of our services to our clients. OpsDiligence, our proprietary ODD system, is driven by industry leading technology. In conjunction with our OpsMonitoring service, Castle Hall Alternatives provides a truly modular structure which allows a flexible, risk- based approach to due diligence and ongoing monitoring. As we continually work to streamline, expand and strengthen our service offerings we are pleased to have recently launched a range of powerful new monitoring functions to OpsDiligence, our online diligence system. OpsMonitor service begins with daily media monitoring. Castle Hall s team carefully curates news feeds to remove the false positives and duplicates that clog standard internet searches. Media alerts are then delivered automatically to each member of an investor s portfolio, risk, compliance, and diligence teams. On a quarterly basis, Castle Hall uses proprietary questionnaires to update key manager and fund data points and identify operational and business changes across every third party investment. The results of the monitoring process are
delivered via update Alerts at the individual fund level and through dashboards showing status across the entire portfolio. Investors can instantly see if their funds are in the green, or if yellow or red flags have been identified during the most recent quarterly monitoring process. On an annual basis, investors may receive large numbers of audited financial statements issued by the funds in their portfolios. Reviewing those financial statements is, however, a time consuming and challenging task. OpsMonitor now offers investors interactive dashboards to identify potential financial reporting risks. Dashboards highlight OpsMonitor Alerts across 10 categories, including identity of the auditor, whether the audit is qualified and issued on a timely basis, and whether the fund and underlying master fund has a high expense ratio, high leverage, or high allocations too hard to value, level 3 assets. This enhancement allows our clients to build more comprehensive risk management processes into their alternative investment programs, thereby increasing overall investor confidence and comfort. The founding members of Castle Hall Alternatives, Christopher Addy and Anne Coady, have industry leading levels of experience and are among the first operational due diligence professionals in the world. In addition, we have added seasoned industry professionals with deep regional experience in Europe and Asia in Christian Nauer (Switzerland) and Alex Wise (Australia) respectively. There is truly no replacement for direct local market knowledge and the many lessons learned through years of in- depth experience in the field of operational due diligence. In addition, Castle Hall Alternatives has one of the largest due diligence teams worldwide. Our highly experienced team is committed to providing more coverage across all asset classes and more flexibility to assess and monitor operational risks for candidates and managers in our client s portfolios. In addition we remain unconflicted in our service as we work only for allocators, not managers, and equally avoid the conflicts that arise when operational diligence is combined with investment advice. We are pleased with the growth of our business and the success of our clients. Castle Hall Alternatives is also moving towards its 10- year anniversary, which will be a significant milestone for our firm. Castle Hall Alternatives is once again delighted and privileged to receive this award and recognition. It is an honour to earn the trust placed in us by our clients. It is our vision to create the best diligence and risk management platform possible for the benefit of our clients. We are inspired by the ever- evolving industry, our clients and the passion and commitment our team has to fulfil our vision. These are the keys to our success. Being recognized within our industry with awards such as this are hugely valuable for internal validation of our efforts, reinforcement of the faith placed in Castle Hall Alternatives by our clients and helping to raise awareness within the industry. Each of these fuel continued growth for the recipients, for their peer group and may increase the confidence of the investing public through independent validation of the quality of services offered. Looking to the future, the firm is growing quickly, adding key people and capacity as we expand our services and partnerships to offer ever greater flexibility and service to our clients. Included in these plans is a redesign of our online OpsDiligence portal, cataloguing of historic investment failures for use by our clients and expanding funds covered across all sectors and global regions.