Beacon Consulting Group, Inc.

SMART Case Study: Creating the Ideal Service Model 

In this case study, learn how SMART helped an asset service provider evaluate and improve their service model and advance the investment manager's strategic vision.

Beacon PeerView: Mutual Fund Financial Reporting Process

This quarter's PeerView focuses on a few topics related to mutual fund financial reporting based on a survey of the members of the Financial Reporting Professionals Group.

Five Ideas for Chief Operating Officers and Directors of Operations

Five turnkey ideas for Chief Operating Officers and Directors of Operations designed to ensure that operations are aligned with a firm's overall strategy, risk profile, and operational requirements.

Navigating Risk: An Operational Risk Survey

Beacon Consulting Group and Advent have conducted an operational risk survey to provide investment managers with a gauge to compare their views and approaches with those of the industry. The findings highlight investment manager’s areas of focus, their level of preparedness, and how they may be responding to the associated risks.

Beacon PeerView: Institutional Account Reconciliations

This quarter’s PeerView focuses on topics related to cash and position reconciliations performed for an investment manager’s institutional and/or separate accounts.

SMART Case Study: Operational Efficiency

How do firms make the right strategic decisions leveraging the best information available?  In this case study, learn how a large global service provider gained critical information from SMART to improve operational efficiency.

Oversight: Getting It Right with Your Service Provider

Now is the time to redefine and transform the level of oversight of outsourced functions.  The current market environment presents an ideal opportunity to redefine oversight and to simultaneously achieve two critical goals: managing operational risk and reducing costs.

A Fresh Perspective on Today's Investment Operations in Canada

Current market conditions have created unprecedented challenges for Canadian investment managers.  Although there are no "silver bullets", we believe investment managers have a unique opportunity to capitalize on recent innovations in the outsourcing space in order to address cost, quality, and risk challenges.

Due Diligence: The Key to a Successful Implementation

In these times of economic uncertainty, the costly mistakes of previous implementation efforts can provide valuable lessons to firms that choose to take note.  In this publication, Beacon explores the common pitfalls that occur on implementations of complex-wide, highly configurable technology and provides recommendations on how firms can prevent these issues from transpiring.

Financial Reporting Benchmark Study

The benchmark study provides investment managers and investment company service providers with a unique perspective and valuable insights on the financial reporting process.

Report includes:

• Comparison of Outsource to In-house Workloads and Staffing
• Work Allocation by Task
• Impact of Cycle Overlap on Workload
• Work Allocation by Employee Level
• Average Hours per Fund
• Length of Financial Reporting Cycle
• Beacon's Best Practices

Middle Office Survey Results

Beacon's Middle Office Survey indicates that that the middle office is predominantly about data – capturing it, reconciling it, owning it, and making it useable and available throughout the firm to enhance decision making.  Enterprise-wide access to quality, timely data is a critical component in driving operational efficiency, asset growth and investment performance.

How to Select and Convert Fund Administrators

The first publication in Beacon Consulting Group’s "Standing Out: Operational Excellence for Hedge Fund Managers" series designed to address key operational challenges faced by today’s hedge fund managers. Converting to a new hedge fund administrator is a major decision that should include a current state assessment, a detailed RFP, and due diligence process as well as comprehensive planning.

Opportunities in the Evolving Middle Office

Read Beacon's perspective on how the middle office has evolved into a critical component in the investment lifecycle.  Beacon examines the opportunities to improve the middle office through in-house operating model initiatives, enhanced technology applications, and outsourcing to service providers.  Beacon stresses that investment managers must understand where they are today, where they want to be in the future, and build a strategy and implementation plan around the services and technology options currently available.