Castle Hall Alternatives has launched OpsMonitor a due diligence platform featuring daily media monitoring, a comprehensive process to identify changes in manager and fund operational risk quarter to quarter.
OpsMonitor also provides interactive dashboards to identify risks present in fund annual financial statements.
“Castle Hall is excited to introduce a range of powerful new monitoring functions to OpsDiligence, our online diligence system,” says Chris Addy, Castle Hall’s CEO. “Due diligence has evolved: rather than wait for traditional, annual diligence meetings, investors increasingly recognise the value of ongoing monitoring to identify and react to potential operational risks in real time. With regularly updated operational risk information, investors can monitor risk and better calibrate their diligence programs across different asset classes and types of manager”.
OpsMonitor 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,” says Anne Coady, Castle Hall’s Managing Director. “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 to hard to value, level 3 assets”.
“At its heart, OpsMonitor is a risk management tool,” says Addy. “With better monitoring and flexible, real time risk dashboards, OpsMonitor helps investors spend 80% of their time budget on investments which may have operational diligence issues – not spend 80% of their time getting to those 20%.”
