Attract/Retain Talent and Deliver Greater Client Value

One of the most important and complex back-office responsibilities for fund administrators on behalf of their clients is to properly calculate and allocate carried interest to investors.   Any misallocation of profits can turn the investor relationship sideways and lead to reputational damage and client churn.

In the past, firms that were capable of recruiting and retaining high-skilled talent had consistently achieved a competitive edge. However, amid fierce competition and rising compensation for highly sought-after back-office personnel, is proving very difficult for these firms to keep pace with their growth and sustain a high operating and service-delivery standard. In a recent E&Y survey, more than 100 COOs and CFOs in the private equity industry shared that besides asset growth, talent management and enhancing back-office processes were of utmost priority.

Consequently, fund administrators are shifting their attention to waterfall automation to drive a digital culture to attract, retain and scale their back-office organization.  While Excel has been the industry ‘universal’ standard amongst fund accountants to perform their work, the Cascata solution is designed for fund accountants to elevate their operating standard well beyond Excel to a fully ‘digital experience’ with automated processes and workflows, standardized waterfall calculation best practices and 100% self-administration.  Fund accountants no longer must manage independent Excel spreadsheets making it easier for reporting and freeing up invaluable time to focus on more strategic tasks. The net result is increased employee efficiency, performance and satisfaction that ultimately results in improved talent management and increased client value and trust. 
If you are interested in learning more or requesting a demo of the Cascata digital waterfall fund administration platform, please contact us at [email protected] or click this link.

EFSI, a leading alternative investment fund administrator, and Cascata Solutions, the leading automated waterfall fund administration software provider, are pleased to announce a strategic partnership that will deliver an advanced digital experience for back-office carried interest, management fee and expense accounting and administration for EFSI’s clients spanning private equity, private credit, real estate, hedge funds and hybrid funds.

The continued pace of growth of the private equity industry brings added risk for fund administrators because their ‘modus operandi’ is based on key-personnel, manual data and processes, and Excel-based work. This is making it difficult for them to scale and keep pace with new fund launches and client growth, increasing investor demands and changing regulatory landscape.  Likewise, with the blurring of open- and closed-end funds and hedge funds making inroads into the private equity space, many are out of their “swimming lane” with limited private equity operations and accounting experience, technology, and best practices.

Consequently, waterfall administration has become a high value area for digitalization with increasing commercial acceptance.

“While waterfall innovation has been around for a while, we have delivered the critical “last several miles” of functionality that addresses the major product shortcomings of other vendor offerings. As a result, we have been privileged to partner with fund administrators like EFSI that are taking a leadership position to deliver greater client value through digital-enabled services leveraging the Cascata platform”, says Chuck Dooley, Cascata CEO and co-founder.

“Our partnership with Cascata highlights our continued commitment to innovation. We are raising the bar with Cascata to achieve operational scale and service-level gains and deliver an enhanced fund accounting and administration service with standardized ‘system-level’ waterfall and accounting best practices,  digitization of all pertinent fund information and a full-fledged Excel model output with formula transparency, that makes it much easier for my team’s reporting to our clients and auditors without having to manage our own individual spreadsheets”, added Anthony Mascia, EFSI Managing Member.

Cascata Solutions, the leader in automated waterfall fund administration software and services for private capital administrators and their clients, announced today a new software release that addresses the major impediments to the commercial adoption of back-office waterfall digital technology. Most paramount is the delivery of formula transparency in a full-fledged Excel model for all key system-generated calculations such as preferred return, e.g. IRR, simple compounding, or interest on net contribution for American and European-style waterfall arrangements. The system-generated Excel model makes it easy for fund administrators to share the waterfall/carried interest results with auditors and their clients.

“Waterfall innovation has been available for well over a decade. However, because of major shortcomings such as system-level formula transparency, waterfall model coverage, and limited ease of use, the continued dependency on Excel and people-driven operating models prevailed”, says Maarten Robberts, managing director at Atlas Fund Services recently acquired by Zedra. “With Cascata’s full-formula transparency, fund administrators can rely on a systematic approach and no longer have to manage their own Excel spreadsheets for traceability of their calculations and disclosed financials.”

Another major feature in Cascata’s software release is a conditional, user-defined carried interest calculation engine. Most waterfall software solutions have been designed with the most basic static rules to support a standard lot of carried interest models typically with 4-5 steps (“cascades”) such as the return of capital, preferred return, catch up, and final split. However, for anything more sophisticated, it is typically dependent on the vendor’s professional services to enhance and hard code the logic in the system to support these more challenging models.

“Our solution has been designed and purpose-built from the very beginning for fund accountants for mainstream back-office deployment and 100% self-administration,” says Patrick Brunner, co-founder & director of product strategy. He continues to say, “the conditional, user-defined calculation engine completes the last and most important mile of functionality as it offers our clients an easy, Excel-like rules engine to support the most sophisticated models that may have conditional gates, specific formulistic algorithms and require external data input.”

Accelerated LPA and Legal Document Understanding

NEW YORK (PRWEB) July 14, 2021 -- We are pleased to announce a partnership with Claira LLC (www.claira.io), the leading next-gen AI company specializing in legal contract understanding. This partnership highlights Cascata Solutions’ continued commitment to innovation and further expands our leading automated waterfall and fee management platform for alternative asset investors, asset managers, and fund administrators.

Using Claira’s advanced AI and data science technology, Cascata has further enhanced its proven data sourcing and system commissioning methodology. “With most of our clients having 100s to 1000s of funds under management of all complexity, leveraging Claira’s AI technology will minimize human intervention to analyze typically lengthy Limited Partner Agreements (LPAs) and side letters and thereby significantly improve implementation time by 70% or more when extracting deal economics and interpreting legal terms and conditions crucial to calculating and reporting fund performance and management fees,” said Chuck Dooley, Cascata CEO and Co-founder.

“Working with Claira has been highly efficient,” Chuck further added, “without having to provide training data, clients will get the benefit of having all the relevant fund terms, key data elements, and economic details of the arrangement automatically captured on the Cascata platform.” Claira’s pre-trained algorithm enables firms to simply drag & drop LPAs onto the Cascata platform or point Claira to client’s contract repositories to immediately analyze and extract the relevant information. Claira turns the pertinent legal documents into data for Cascata to construct and provision all necessary waterfall models.

Contact us to learn more about the Cascata and Claira partnership and how Cascata’s PE Suite Solution provides an end-to-end platform to automate the administration of primary and shadow private capital waterfall and fee management.

About Cascata (www.cascata-solutions.com) Cascata Solutions is dedicated to delivering advanced digital cloud solutions for the private capital industry to serve institutional investors, asset managers and their partners including fund administrators, software providers and accounting/audit firms to modernize their back-office operation for distribution waterfall administration and more. Cascata Solutions is a privately held and funded company, headquartered in New York City.

About Claira (www.claira.io) Claira is a leading next-gen AI company specializing in legal contract understanding. Built using advanced data science to reveal the underlying logic trapped in financial contracts, Claira is pre-trained to comprehend legal language — providing faster, deeper, and more actionable results with full transparency and traceability in its decision making. No training, setup, or installation required. Claira can be accessed from any web browser or locally installed in a client’s data center.