The Challenge
An SEC filing for an initial public offering is an involved and painstakingly detailed process for even a very “vanilla” type of company. However when you add to the complexity the fact that our client was the first alternative asset manager to make this historic move the scrutiny and the amount of work was exponentially increased.
This asset management company was preparing an SEC filing for an initial public offering. In order to meet regulatory reporting requirements, it needed to produce a consolidated schedule of investments across all of its funds and affiliated entities. This was a complicated task since each of its funds had until then utilized separate systems and even fund administrators to keep track of their investments.
To complicate matters further, this asset manager was in unchartered territory as the first U.S. hedge fund to go public. Since there was no precedent, there was uncertainty as to the type of information that was going to be requested by the SEC. To ensure as few delays as possible, they needed to be prepared for any and all requests from both their external auditors and the regulators.
The Solution
FinServ provided a team of technical and business experts to develop a custom application to store and enrich investment data. A detailed data model was designed to efficiently allow investment data from existing subledgers, spreadsheets and extracts to be stored in the application.
FinServ leveraged its knowledge of General Ledger applications to automate the reconciliation between the investment database and the firms enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. Various sessions were conducted with each business line to ensure the accuracy of the data and ultimately sign off was required before submission. FinServ sat on the IPO steering committee where they collaborated with the external auditor, CFO and the other firm executives to address any issues and concerns.
The Result
The application created by FinServ became the central repository for investment data across all funds and related entities of this alternative asset management firm. The various schedules of investments were completed within the sensitive regulatory reporting timeline. The reports produced by the application were included in the S-1 filing to the SEC and are still being used for subsequent 10-K submissions. External auditors’ questions were all be answered using the flexible reporting available within the application. When the SEC came back with revisions to the S-1 filing, not one revision was requested for any of the schedules produced by this application.
