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Wealth manager Contango Capital Advisors, Inc. has reached an agreement with Rainier Group Investment Advisory (RGIA) to provide it with access to Contango's investment platform.
This relationship will allow RGIA to leverage Contango's specialized understanding of alternative investments and its ability to evaluate and recommend specific alternative investment opportunities. Contango utilizes a variety of modeling tools and risk management techniques to create portfolios for its clients. Working with Contango, RGIA will enhance its client portfolios and expand the scope of products it provides by adding alternative investments."Through this relationship, we will be able to tap Contango's expertise where Contango has particular strengths, such as alternative investments and sophisticated risk-management analysis. Wealth management clients today require a level of sophistication far beyond that of just a decade ago," said Norman Bell, president of RGIA, in a release.
Although RGIA is the first external company to make use of Contango's investment platform, the company plans to make the platform available on a broader basis in the near future. Contango's platform is a Web-enabled technology which offers advanced reporting and analysis tools, the ability to share and analyze financial data, and access to financial products and services.
Evercore Asset Management Outsources Back Office to Mellon
The Investment Manager Solutions group of Mellon Financial Corp. will administer the back-office operations of Evercore Asset Management (EAM), an institutional investment manager. Among the services that Mellon will provide are transaction processing, custodian reconciliation, performance measurement and analytics, and investor reporting.
"All of us at EAM are committed to building a lasting franchise that will benefit our clients over the long term, and Mellon will help us achieve this objective by providing best-in-class infrastructure support," said Margot Nones, COO of EAM, in a release.
EAM is a recently founded investment management firm that takes a long-term approach to investing in small- and mid-capitalization value equities. The company was founded by Greg Sawyers, Andrew Moloff, Gail Landis and Margot Nones in partnership with Evercore Partners.
MAXAM Boosts Efficiency With Backstop IPM
MAXAM Capital Management, a diversified investment firm, has chosen the Backstop Investment Partnership Management (Backstop IPM) software solution from Backstop Solutions Group. Backstop IPM will manage MAXAM's portfolio management, manager due diligence and research, client relationship management and reporting processes.
MAXAM selected Backstop IPM to fill its need for a system from which all employees and independent members of the MAXAM Consortium could easily access, analyze and share critical business intelligence. By bringing together specialized tools, business infrastructure and ongoing support into a single package, Backstop IPM offers MAXAM a flexible alternative to expensive internal development initiatives, and enables the firm to enhance the aggregation, analysis and delivery of data across the entire organization.
With the rapid growth of the hedge fund industry, MAXAM needed a way to drive efficiencies in its business functions in order to keep up.
"With the growing number of new funds created every day, manager research is becoming more complex," said Sandra Manzke, CEO of MAXAM Capital Management, in a release. "We chose Backstop IPM [because] it simply offers the most cost-effective, easy-to-deploy and rapidly scalable solution for collaborative research and information management."
Pacific Select Group to Use SunGuard's Protegent Surveillance
Pacific Select Group (PSG), the retail broker-dealer holding company and subsidiary of Pacific Life Insurance Company, has chosen to use the Protegent Surveillance brokerage compliance solution from SunGard. PSG will roll out the product as part of its Advisor Connect integrated suite to independent firms within PSG's broker-dealer network.
Protegent Surveillance will help PSG network firms and their registered representatives with determining suitability of investments for their clients, analyzing the quality of supervisions and practice, and responding quickly to regulatory and legislative requirements. PSG expects the product to increase time and cost efficiencies.
"Protegent Surveillance is one of the most comprehensive compliance solutions available. It will provide our broker-dealers with a more efficient, cost-effective way to automate and accelerate review of trades in the field," said Mike Graham, vice president of technology at PSG, in a release. "Not only will Protegent Surveillance help expedite trading for reps, it will provide efficiencies for our broker-dealers' home offices and compliance officers."
By integrating with PSG's AdvisorConnect platform to perform pre- and post-trade review, Protegent Surveillance will give compliance staff the ability to automatically identify exceptions. The product will augment AdvisorConnect's automated trading process, providing representatives with the ability to open a brokerage account and enter trades online, conduct trades more efficiently, and provide more comprehensive service to their clients.
