Simcorp's Annual Event 2019 | SimCorp | 2 July 2019 | The Peninsula Hotel, 1 Chome-8-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda City, Tokyo 100-0006, Japan

Japanese investors’ appetite for risk-adjusted returns has hit a new peak, at a time when bond allocations have sunk to a record low. Alternative investments are now becoming the asset class of choice, delivering a new and timely source of alpha for Japanese asset managers and pension funds.

However, alternatives are among the most challenging and costly asset class to handle. In a recent study of the world’s most important and complex asset owners, CEM Bench marking found that transaction costs for public stocks are 6bps versus 48bps for private equity.

Most asset owners still use a combination of fragmented processes and systems to support the alternatives’ business. This involves arduous manual reconciliation of data in different systems and across various spreadsheets. This inefficient process is not only harmful to resource allocation, but also creates high operational risks, which in turn translates into more operational bottlenecks and errors.

Finding the right operating model for better scale and automation is now mission critical.