Omnify, a specialist IT and software services supplier to the financial services industry, has today launched a new version of Athena Investment Systems’ “Aura” application to UK Hedge Funds. Aura is a real-time dashboard that provides an inexpensive method of viewing consolidated positions and trade information across multiple prime brokers.
Aura’s Real-Time Analytics, Visualization and Business Intelligence dashboard solves the consolidated reporting problem for hedge funds by automatically extracting and aggregating raw positions and trades from multiple prime brokers as well as from other sources including fund administrators, accounting systems, order management systems and market data systems. Aura then calculates real-time Exposures, Risk, P&L and Performance at all levels including trade, position, trade pair, strategy and fund.
Following the collapse of Lehman’s in 2008 and recent market turmoil, many hedge funds that had previously only used a single prime broker are now utilising the services of multiple prime brokers to diversify their counterparty risk and help reduce their dependence on external service providers.
"Athena’s Aura dashboard offers a low cost and low risk way of making the operational changes necessary to move to a multi-prime environment”, says Andy King, business development director at Omnify. “Aura automatically aggregates position and trade information from multiple prime brokers, generating consolidated reports for Managers, Analysts and Traders. Aura’s dashboard also ensures that all the funds’ data remains in house, providing greater self-sufficiency and ensuring each prime broker only has access to their own portion of the portfolio.”
According to Scott Sykowski, principal analyst at Athena, "funds were getting separate sets of reports from each prime broker, and someone at each fund was spending an hour or more each day consolidating these reports. With Aura, we return this time to the firm, while also providing managers with more control and better actionable information including Positions, Exposures, Risk Values, P&L, Performance, Income Bucketing and Broker Performance Information.”
