Virtus Partners Launches Hedge Fund Admin Service on SunGard VPM

Alternative investment fund managers looking to invest in credit products across the bank loan and corporate debt space are often faced with a bottleneck at their administrator, making it difficult to cope with the complexity of credit investment strategies. This also limits the fund’s range of potential strategies, impacting returns.

With the new offering Houston, Tx.-based Virtus, with $200 billion under administration, will combine its expertise in credit and fixed income strategies and its automated platform for handling bank loans with SunGard’s VPM platform. Together, clients’ middle- and back-office functions will be fully supported as they trade into and out of positions, helping to mitigate associated operational risks and cost. Virtus’ fund services recently launched with a multibillion-dollar mandate for the US and Europe.

“We selected VPM on the basis of its flexible architecture and easy integration with Virtus’ existing platform, which allowed a rapid time-to-market for the fund administration service," says Jeffery Law, head of hedge fund services at VP Fund Services, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Virtus Partners Holdings.

"Additionally, the transparency afforded by VPM gives our clients the capacity to log directly into our portfolio accounting system on a read-only basis to examine the processing and service in real-time. This is hugely important given the emphasis on transparency driven by existing regulation, such as the Alternative Investment Fund Manager Directive (AIFMD) and future rules including the review of the Markets in Financial Instrument Directive (MiFID II).”