Novus Partners with $2.5B Swiss-based Fund of Hedge Funds Provider

Institutional investors define new standards for managing hedge fund portfolios through cutting-edge analytics platform

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Jun 24, 2014, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, June 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Novus, a portfolio analytics and intelligence platform that helps institutional investors analyze their portfolios, today announced its partnership with Thalia, a provider of hedge fund investment solutions based in Switzerland with $1.8 billion in assets under management and advisory.

Transparency within hedge funds has significantly increased since the financial crisis, with approximately 70 percent of hedge funds reporting exposures and attribution along several key categories and many more aggregating portfolio statistics on a monthly basis. In addition, 20 percent of funds go as far as reporting position-level information to their investors on a monthly basis. Unlike traditional performance management systems, Novus gives investors the ability to analyze far more than returns in order to better understand how their managers are contributing to their overall portfolio in an efficient, intuitive and visually rich way.

"In today's increasingly transparent investing environment, allocators are facing a data overload. Analyzing single manager data is complex enough, but when compounded across 50 to 100 managers, investors are at a loss as to how to make the most (or even deal with) such complexity. For an allocator investing or monitoring 70 managers (the typical average for European allocators) this can easily translate into 70,000 data points to be digested yearly. Due diligence must go beyond one-on-one meetings with managers and basic financial analysis. Not knowing is negligence," said Basil Qunibi, Chief Executive Officer, Novus. "In addition to the risk management benefits we provide, our clients have reported gaining an additional three percent per year on average using our analytics. No doubt, investors clearly have something to gain by having better ways to measure the success of their manager allocations."

"No longer is it enough to simply find the best managers and secure capacity in those funds – we have a fiduciary responsibility to analyze an overwhelming amount of data provided by those managers to minimize risks and make strategic decisions on behalf of our clients. Our partnership with Novus allows us to shift our focus entirely to what we do best: invest," commented Margrethe Rokkum-Testi, Chief Investment Officer, Thalia.

"Thalia has always had a stellar market reputation for being data-driven and forward-thinking in their approach to portfolio management and research. Novus is excited about this partnership and we look forward to working with Thalia to roll-out new industry standards for how portfolios should be managed and analyzed," said Andrea Gentilini, Novus' Head of Europe.

About Novus:
Novus was founded in 2007 by a group of investors, data scientists and engineers to build a portfolio analytics and intelligence platform for institutional investors. Today, the platform is used by some of the top hedge funds, fund of funds, pensions & endowments and sovereign wealth funds to analyze their risk, performance and attribution.

Portfolio managers, investor relations and operations teams use the Novus Platform in different ways, but most use the platform to analyze and manage their risks, report to their investors and ultimately generate more alpha with better portfolio intelligence. Through the firm's data-driven approach, industry-leading analytics and unique team of ex-portfolio managers and investors, Novus is transforming the way the world invests.

Novus is based in New York, with offices in San Francisco, California and Zurich, Switzerland. For more information, visit http://www.novus.com.

SOURCE Novus