Alpine utilizes the Paladyne Suite™ for electronic trading and order management including two-way FIX connections, pre-/post-trade compliance, real-time P&L monitoring, portfolio management, reference data management, reconciliation to its prime brokers, and firm-wide reporting. The solution is fully hosted by Paladyne ASP™, which includes a fully managed IT service, 24×7 technical and product support, hardware, product upgrades and quality assurance, and mirrored (“hot site”) disaster recovery.

“With the growth of our firm and our plans for the future, we realized that we needed one integrated solution that was automated, and emphasized straight through processing across our entire organization and counterparties” explained Frank Fiorello, Head Trader at Alpine Associates. “We are extremely satisfied with the breadth of functionality that Paladyne offers, with this one relationship we now have a complete solution that supports our entire workflow, requires less internal resources, and appears to be much more cost-effective.”

“We are very happy to partner with a high-profile firm such as Alpine Associates,” commented Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne. “Alpine is yet another textbook example of a firm making the decision to replace its proprietary legacy technology with a cost-effective integrated suite of products bundled with a full-service IT solution.”

Media Contacts

Lisa Jane O’Neil
1-212-786-7629 or 917-361-8303
lisajane@ljoassociates.com

CZ Capital utilizes Paladyne FastStart™ for electronic trading and order management, pre- and post-trade compliance, real-time P&L monitoring, portfolio management, daily reconciliation, and firm-wide reporting. Paladyne FastStart™ is offered as a fully hosted ASP solution complete with managed IT services, 24×7 technical and product support, hardware, product upgrades and quality assurance, market data infrastructure, and mirrored (“hot site”) disaster recovery.

“Our decision to switch from our current system provider was driven by our need for enhanced front-office trading and compliance capabilities, and superior levels of support,” said Matthew Wright, Manager of Operations at CZ Capital.  “Paladyne’s combined technology, data, and hosting services are head and shoulders above the competition, and our experience with the implementation and on-going support has been first-rate and reinforces our decision.”

“We are very happy to have CZ Capital as part of our growing European client base,” said Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne. “CZ reflects a clear need in Europe for more comprehensive technology and higher service levels, as well as, a trend toward ASP solutions. Paladyne has recently expanded both its London office and European data center facility in response to this increasing demand.”

About Paladyne FastStart™

Paladyne FastStart™ is an easily deployable ASP-delivered solution that combines Paladyne’s front-to-back technology platform, with operational and IT support, and is designed to reduce cost and improve operational efficiency and control.

Media Contacts

Lisa Jane O’Neil
1-212-786-7629 or 917-361-8303
lisajane@ljoassociates.com

Since Paladyne FastStart™ was introduced in Asia-Pacific 15 clients have signed-up for this unique bundled offering.  Firms implemented include Paridon Asia, Instinct Capital, and Gen2 Partners.

“After our due diligence process we found Paladyne FastStart™ to be the solution for us that was capable of handling the complexity of our strategies, as well as the growth we anticipate in the coming months,“ explained Robert van Paridon, CEO of Paridon Asia, a Singapore-based Asian macro hedge fund.

“We are delighted that Paladyne FastStart™ has resonated so profoundly as an industry standard solution for fund managers in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne. “We have recently hired five new employees and have plans to continue our aggressive expansion with the addition of a further ten employees to our Hong Kong office in 2011,” he said.

About Paladyne FastStart™

Paladyne FastStart™ is an easily deployable ASP-delivered solution that combines Paladyne’s front-to-back technology platform, with operational and IT support, and is designed to reduce cost and improve operational efficiency and control.

Media Contacts

Lisa Jane O’Neil
1-212-786-7629 or 917-361-8303
lisajane@ljoassociates.com

Some key findings of the report include the following:

• The industry finished 2010 with $2.47 trillion under management. This compares with the industry all time high of $2.86 trillion reached in 2007.
• Total net inflows were $80.59 billion in 2010 compared with net outflows of $128.55 billion in 2009 and $446.93 billion in 2008.
• Fund of fund assets, while still representing a significant portion of the industry, continue their steady decline now representing approximately 38% of industry assets, compared with 52% in 2003.
• The industry continued its movement away from multi-strategy firms to more targeted investments with event-driven and credit arbitrage funds seeing the strongest inflows in 2010.
• Europe led both North America and Asia in growth rates in 2010, possibly due to the availability and popularity of UCITS funds.
• Large firms (firms with greater than $1billion under management) garnered 74% of all inflows.

Looking to 2011 many of the trends outlined above are continuing into the early part of 2011 including a modest increase in total industry assets under management. The overall tone of the report seems to indicate that the dark days of 2008 are now firmly behind us and that the industry is now experiencing considerable positive momentum.

ZAN Partners elected to replace its existing in-house portfolio accounting and general ledger system with Paladyne FastStart™, a unique combination of order management and portfolio management functionality delivered as a fully hosted, ASP solution. Paladyne FastStart™ provides ZAN Partners with order management, pre-and post-trade compliance, real-time P&L and exposure monitoring, portfolio management, NAV reporting and automated 3rd-party reconciliation. Paladyne’s hosted platform, known as Paladyne ASP™, provides ZAN Partners with a fully managed IT service, 24×7 technical and product support, hardware, product upgrades and mirrored (“hot site”) disaster recovery.

“Once we decided to make the switch to Paladyne’s all-in-one solution we gave their services team a very aggressive migration timeline,” explained Zain Naqi, CEO of ZAN Partners. “We were really impressed by the speed and thoroughness of the entire Paladyne FastStart™ implementation, and look forward to a close partnership with Paladyne in the coming years.”

“We are thrilled that we were able to transition ZAN Partners to our platform in a very short period of time,” commented Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne. “ZAN Partners is yet another example of a firm making the decision to move away from heavier, less integrated in-house solutions, to Paladyne’s fully-hosted front-to-back solution, which has the ability to shadow all of a firm’s counterparties including the fund administrator.”

About Paladyne FastStart™

Paladyne FastStart™ is an easily deployable ASP-delivered solution that combines Paladyne’s front-to-back technology platform, with operational and IT support, and is designed to reduce cost and improve operational efficiency and control.

Media Contacts

Lisa Jane O’Neil
1-212-786-7629 or 917-361-8303
lisajane@ljoassociates.com

There are, however, two very important differences between the world we now face and the pre-crisis world.  These differences include the new attitude of investors and the reality of new regulation:

Investor attitude – the crisis has irrevocably changed the behavior of the most important player in the industry, the hedge fund investor.  Today’s investor is now much more aware of the potential downside and now demands a full understanding of all the risks associated with their investment.  In short, what had been the investor’s primary goal of achieving superior returns, is now complemented by a new secondary goal, that of asset preservation.

Regulation – The Dodd-Frank Act and The Alternative Investment Fund Managers are the two important global regulations that have emerged in response to the crisis.  Both regulations seek to protect the investor. The impact of both will begin to make themselves felt throughout 2011 and beyond.

So how can a hedge fund manager thrive in this new world? The rules of engagement are in fact very simple. Broadly speaking hedge fund managers must demonstrate to investors and regulators that they have in place a comprehensive framework to address asset preservation and regulatory concerns. More specifically, managers need to focus on these 5 areas:

1.    Alignment of Interests with Investors – Managers must prove to investors that they will succeed together.  Such alignment will result in less managers “swinging for the fences” in order to obtain high, short-term incentive fees.  Examples could include the introduction of long-dated options on fund performance, clawback provisions, hurdle rates, and offering participation in hedge fund manager ownership.

2.    Creation of New Structures – Offering more investor-friendly vehicles such as managed accounts and UCITS compliant funds will reassure investors with the knowledge that they have control over their assets at all times.

3.    Manage counterparty risk – All funds, even the smallest, now require multiple prime relationships.

4.    Formalize operations, technology and infrastructure – The days of the spreadsheet are over.  Managers need to pass the rigorous investor due diligence (e.g. SAS 70 certification).

5.    Managed transparency – Hedge fund managers will need to continue to implement meaningful transparency, particularly in regards to portfolio management. Managers, particularly small to medium, will look to their third party administrators to provide or extend on reporting to investors while larger funds may implement formal client reporting systems in-house.

Peter Curley joined Paladyne Systems in December 2009 and is responsible for all aspects of Paladyne’s corporate and product marketing. Prior to joining Paladyne Mr. Curley was a managing partner at Nirvana Solutions, a hedge fund solutions provider, where he oversaw all of Nirvana’s marketing. Prior to that he was the product manager for Advent Software’s trading group with responsibility for managing that group’s worldwide product marketing activities.

Today, Paladyne’s reference data management products are used by over ninety (90) clients worldwide, including many of the world’s largest banks, hedge funds, and asset management firms.

Major new features in Paladyne’s reference data management suite include:

* Custom Interface Designer — users may customize the user interface to support client specific data and workflow requirements.

* Investment Type Designer — users may dynamically create new security type definitions including custom fields and schedules, corporate actions, issuer relationships, etc.

* Validation Manager — users may create client specific validation rules for saving and posting securities to support custom workflows.

* Field Level Record Locking — users may lock data fields from updates and manage how updates are distributed.

* Web-based dashboards and custom reporting tools for data monitoring and firm-wide reference data management.

* Enhanced Daily Tasks Manager — users may monitor and process all corporate actions and portfolio events (e.g., swap resets, expirations, payments, etc.) from a centralized dashboard.

* Curve Manager — users may create and manage curves (e.g., Credit, Yield, Forward, etc.), to support security valuation and risk requirements.

* Security Group Manager — rules-based engine for defining and dynamically maintaining security classifications and custom groupings for trading, risk, research and compliance needs.

* Certified product adapters to latest releases of Paladyne Portfolio Master™, Advent’s Geneva® and Axys®, SunGard’s VPM™ and Front Arena™, Charles River Development IMS™, Eze OMS®, etc.

Quintillion, an independent fund administration company based in Dublin, Ireland, was among the first clients to upgrade to the latest version of Paladyne’s reference data management suite. “The recent enhancements of Paladyne’s reference data management suite has allowed us to considerably improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our pricing and data management process, eliminate manual intervention, and reach daily deadlines much earlier than was previously possible,” said Joan Kehoe, Chief Executive Officer. “We have been very impressed by this major release and the speed at which we were able to implement it.”

“It is very satisfying to know that the Paladyne reference data management suite has become the accepted standard throughout the financial services industry,” said Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne Systems. “This latest version builds on our suite’s already comprehensive functionality and focuses on ensuring that the entire data management process is as automated and efficient as possible.”

About Paladyne Security Master™

Paladyne Security Master™ is a reference data management solution that allows firms to create one global repository or “Golden Copy” for security prices, market data, terms and conditions, and corporate actions that can be populated from multiple data sources (e.g., Bloomberg®, Thomson Reuters®, and Markit®). Additionally the solution is tightly integrated with many of the leading financial technology applications such as Paladyne Portfolio Master™, Eze OMS®, Charles River Development IMS™, Advent’s Geneva® and Axys®, SunGard’s VPM™ and Front Arena™.

About Paladyne Price Master™

Paladyne Price Master™ is a centralized pricing and market data solution developed to support the complex pricing and valuation requirements of today’s investment managers. Paladyne Price Master™ collects and stores pricing data from multiple sources (e.g., data vendors, broker files, spreadsheets, and text files) and provides a flexible user interface for analyzing prices and defining pricing rules to comply with firm-wide pricing policies.

“We have seen a huge increase in global start-up activity as well as a large number of fund closures due to cost pressures and inability to raise capital,” said Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne Systems. “As a direct response to these trends, our bundled technology and services offering is a low cost and easily deployable solution that meets the complex due diligence requirements of institutional investors.”

Paladyne FastStart™ includes:

• Multi-asset class trading and order management
• Pre- and post-trade compliance tracking and reporting
• Real-time P&L and portfolio exposure views
• Intra-day risk analysis and model-based valuation
• NAV reporting and daily portfolio accounting
• Daily reconciliation and “shadow reporting” with fund administrators
• Time-weighted and AIMR-compliant performance measurement
• Automated security setup, corporate actions processing, and pricing with Paladyne Data Services™
• Automated counterparty communication and daily reconciliation with Paladyne Tradelink™
• Fully-hosted IT and disaster recovery solution with SAS 70 Type II certified global data centers and 24×7 monitoring and support services
• Low-cost, turn-key implementation service

“As a start-up manager, we required a robust trading and portfolio management system that was affordable and that we could implement in a very short time frame. It needed to work seamlessly with our prime brokers, counterparties and administrator. Paladyne’s fully hosted solution integrates all of our trading, portfolio management, accounting and risk requirements into a single platform and offers significant operational and IT support which reduces our personnel needs,” said George Roeck, CFO/COO at Charter Bridge Capital Management.

“Selecting Paladyne as our technology partner for the fixed income investment strategy was a great fit,” said Steven Higgins, Chief Financial Officer at Vision Capital Advisors, LLC. “The Paladyne suite offers a lot of value as a front-, middle and back-office solution combined with a full-service IT infrastructure.  The ease of timing and accuracy of financial reporting are significantly enhanced using Paladyne.”

“The Paladyne value proposition consisting of an integrated suite of products bundled with a full-service IT solution is very compelling,” said Sameer Shalaby, CEO of Paladyne Systems.

“We were impressed with Paladyne’s service team,” explained Steven Higgins. “Paladyne consultants worked closely with our team to analyze our complex workflow and to implement the products accordingly. Their technical staff is available as needed to support all of our IT requirements.  The technology allows us to reconcile assets and performance to our fund administrator each month.”