By Clint Coghill

Two months ago, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at Agecroft’s Gaining the Edge hedge fund conference called, “The Arms Race to Alpha.” My co-panelists consisted of asset owners who allocate to hedge funds: Alifia Doriwala of Rock Creek, David Gilmore of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Karen Inal of The Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Robert Kiernan of Advanced Portfolio Management. We got together on stage to talk about the innovative ways they’re seeing hedge fund managers drive alpha, and I thought I’d share the most illuminating takeaways from our session.

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It’s not always what you say, but how you say it that counts. Especially when you’re asking investors to update their personal information via email or worse, mailed paper forms. That doesn’t exactly scream effective and expedient communications.

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By the Backstop WIT Group

Two years ago, a group of women at Backstop created the “Women & Gender Minorities in Technology” group as part of our employee-facing diversity and inclusion programming efforts. The “WIT” group provides active affirmation of Backstop’s support of diversity and inclusion. It also strives to provide opportunities for fellow Chicagoans to take a deep-dive into the most interesting and relevant topics in the financial services industry.

One of those opportunities recently saw us hosting a panel offering real-world perspectives on impact investing and the benefits it can achieve, particularly with regard to promoting diversity and inclusion. The theme of the WIT gathering was, “The Impact of Impact Investing: How Diversity & Inclusion Have Bolstered Performance.” The goal of the event was to help educate and share experiences on the growth of impact investing and its importance in solving major problems and promoting greater social and corporate responsibility.

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It’s an exceptionally hectic Monday. Your morning commute was snarled, your usual cup of coffee was polluted with the wrong creamer, and now you’re scrambling to make your weekly business development meeting. By the time you print off your prospective investors/opportunities report and dash in, it’s far too late to fix the fields that you just noticed you forgot to fill out during the week.

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As an institutional asset owner, this scenario may be nauseatingly familiar: several days have passed since the end of the quarter, and you still haven’t received the quarterly follow up from all of your investment managers.  In fact, you expect all of your investment managers to send you regular monthly check-in correspondence, and every month, this one is late.  How are you supposed to adhere to your institution’s compliance policies or review key performance portfolio indicators?

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