Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Newcomer (Vendor or Product) and Best Buy-Side Product for 2012─Advise Technologies

Advise Technologies has stepped up to the plate and separated itself from the competition, helping large numbers of funds complete their forms. All told, Advise worked with a pool of hedge funds that represents more than $900 billion in combined private fund assets under management- which equates to more than 100 hedge funds-using its Consensus RMS solution. It is for this reason that Advise was named by our judging panel as both the Best Buy-Side Newcomer (Vendor or Product), and Best Buy-Side Product for 2012, a unique achievement in the seven-year history of the Buy-Side Technology Awards.

Consensus RMS offers products ranging from desktop software to a complete start-to-finish solution. Hedge funds learned this year that pulling in their data from disparate sources was no easy task─they needed help to automate the process. Form PF doesn't provide a competitive advantage─it is simply a regulatory burden, but one that is vital in allowing the SEC to monitor systemic risk in the US alternative asset management sector. While dozens of vendors entered the market with Form PF solutions, most were simply repackaged services.

But Doug Schwenk, former COO of a $6 billion hedge fund, and founder and CEO of Advise, understood first-hand the challenge that his fellow COOs in the industry were up against. It was with that in mind that Consensus RMS was designed, allowing funds to automate the filing process, to aggregate and normalize the necessary data, and to make changes on the fly as new regulatory guidelines filter down from the SEC.

Whether hedge funds like it or not, Form PF is here to stay. And considering how well Consensus RMS has been received by the industry, so too is Advise Technologies.