International Herald Tribune – It used to be that if you wanted a job done properly, you did it yourself. That no longer holds for the administration of hedge funds.
The practice of doing middle- and back-office administrative work in-house, especially prevalent in long-established U.S. funds, was already on the wane.
But Bernard Madoff’s alleged fraud, abetted by his self-contained operation, has accelerated the march toward outsourcing.
Exhibit A this week is Millennium Management, the old-school hedge fund firm run by Izzy Englander. All its funds are now going to be administered by GlobeOp Financial Services. That means that tasks like reconciling cash positions and trades, some pricing and asset value calculations, sending clients statements and so on will now be handled outside the firm.
