Gravitas Enhances Its Risk Assessment Service to Align Alternative Investment Clients

Gravitas Technology, a provider of technology services to the alternative investment management industry, has enhanced its Operational Risk and Technology Assessment service, to help its hedge funds clients adapt to the latest best practice recommendations from the President's Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG). "The PWG's initial recommendations, released in April 2008, provide a compelling case for hedge funds to begin implementing best practices in their systems and processes. Gravitas' newly adapted Operational Risk and Technology Assessment service is ahead of the curve in providing firms with risk mitigation in their critical business processes and the applications that support them," says Jayesh Punater, president and CEO of Gravitas Technology, in a press release.

Gravitas' Operational Risk and Technology Assessment service provides clients with a roadmap to achieving best practices, and offers implementation of systems and processes to alleviate investor scrutiny of a manager's policies and procedures. The components of the Operational Risk and Technology Assessment are a high-level front, middle- and back-office business workflow review, documentation of existing process flows and functions, an operational gap analysis, identification of stress points, and recommendations on process improvement or system (application) changes. The review culminates with formal recommendations on process flows best practices, a policy and procedures manual, and a technology roadmap and a future state operations and technology blueprint the fund should work towards to align itself with the PWG's best practice recommendations. "With the investment landscape growing in complexity due to difficult market conditions, the bar has been raised for larger asset managers to strengthen their infrastructure and risk management practices, in order to gain investor confidence.