Driving Efficiency and Growth for Hedge Fund Managers
In today’s global financial markets, hedge fund managers often include international investments in their portfolios. As these investments are priced in their local currencies, fund managers need to convert these investments into the funds’ base currencies in order to price their portfolios, aggregate investor assets, and benchmark themselves against global indexes.
Backstop Solutions Group (BSG), based in Chicago, provides leading web-based customer relationship management (CRM) and portfolio management (PM) solutions for the hedge fund industry. Backstop’s solutions allow fund managers to easily manage relationships with clients, review complex portfolios, and generate accurate account statements and portfolio reports. BSG currently deploys XigniteCurrencies and XigniteIndices for currency conversion and performance benchmarking.
Automate Global Benchmarking with High Quality Market Data at Affordable Prices
In 2004, BSG decided to deploy Xignite’s currency and index web services for their simple integration, high quality data and low costs. “When we compared data vendors and their solutions, Xignite was the only vendor we found that provided commercial-scale web services for market data. They just understood our needs much better than the traditional players,” said Andy Pruitt, CTO of Backsop Solutions. Xignite provides significant cost advantage over other data vendors. For example, Backstop can choose the specific market data it needs instead of licensing an entire data platform as required by the large, traditional data vendors.
Easily Integrated Market Data
When choosing a market data solution, BSG also weighed considerably on the ease of integration. BSG needed a market data solution that could be easily integrated into different processes to automate currency conversions and performance benchmarking. Xignite’s web service platform reduces significant IT development time, allowing the data services to be deployed and up and running in hours instead of weeks. “We considered looking at a more traditional, FTP or file based solution, but why try and deal with the extra complexity of missed drops and updates?” Overall, Backstop Solutions finds Xignite’s cloud computing delivery model best fits its web-based hedge fund software. Integration is easy with Xignite’s SOAP-based XML web services. Xignite offers accurate data and reliable services on an on-demand platform, allowing Backstop to access market data without incurring costly IT infrastructure. Xignite provides comprehensive market data coverage, over 170 world currencies and 50 global indexes, offering a convenient source of high quality market data at affordable prices.
About Backstop Solutions
Backstop Solutions provides software services that help alternative investment managers to operate efficiently, invest intelligently, and communicate effectively. Founded in 2003, BSG has quickly grown to service a clientele that includes hedge funds, pension funds, endowment funds, funds of funds, and other institutional investors, with more than $300 billion in assets under management. For more information, visit http://www.backstopsolutions.com/.