Novus Announces New Illiquid Portfolio Capabilities for Asset Allocators and Managers

Enhancements of the Novus Platform for portfolio intelligence allow for full user control of portfolio data

New York, Sept. 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Novus Partners, a portfolio intelligence company servicing both asset allocators and managers, today announced significant updates to its platform as it relates to the ingestion and analysis of ‘deep’ portfolio data.

“As we continue to build on our long-term vision to become the ‘one’ platform for institutional investors, over the last 12 months we have made a series of updates to the Novus Platform that expand our portfolio intelligence capabilities; these updates enable our clients to better manage their portfolios through deeper intelligence, collaborative updates, and personalized dashboards,” said Andrea Gentilini, CEO of Novus.

These enhancements include a cash flow projection capability through the Novus “What-If Illiquids” tool, which provides institutional investors with a vital hypothetical analysis instrument to help plan future investments in private assets. The tool lets clients dynamically configure and model how cash flows and portfolio exposures are projected across all funds within a client’s portfolio. As a result of this analysis, investors can forecast their expected future exposures by sector, market cap, and geography.

These enhancements complement Novus’ existing liquidity analysis tool, which allows investors to model redemption terms associated with their ‘liquid’ funds. The two functionalities combined allow investors to properly model cash flow needs, and be on top of funding requirements for their entire portfolio.

These developments also allow for crucial portfolio stress testing. “Consider exogenous market events such as COVID-19, which created a shock in most investors’ portfolios. This liquidity analysis tool enables investors to determine how many days are required to redeem from each portfolio position in order – for example – to fund private market commitments. It also allows managers to comply with new ESMA regulations,” Gentilini added.

Novus has seen notable growth in client acquisition and retention rates during the year-on-year period while it has continued to develop flexible high-quality data management and analysis tools, especially in illiquid investments. As part of its expanded product offerings for illiquid and private equity investments, Novus has also continued to build out its “Private Equity Suite,” which aligns with overall institutional demand for private markets that grew to $7.4 trillion in 2020, with PE accounting for the largest growth of all private asset classes, according to McKinsey.

Consistent with its historical DNA of providing deep, position-level transparency for investors in liquid funds, Novus now provides position-level transparency in private assets. Whether you are investing in a portfolio of real estate, ventures, wine, art, horses, crypto-currencies or non-financial-tokens, Novus provides tools to ingest and represent position-level information alongside other traditional portions of an investor’s portfolio.

“All investors we work with want ‘one’ platform to represent and analyze all of their portfolio data. With the latest enhancements made in private assets, Novus has become just that. Compared to the competition, Novus excels at providing deep transparency on portfolio holdings. With mounting fiduciary obligations for institutional investors to be on top of and in control of their data these tools enable investors to comprehensively meet that need,” Gentilini noted.

Additional Novus updates this year include:

• Snapshots: Clients on the Novus Platform can freeze and share a dashboard by taking a “snapshot.” Clients can customize the accessibility of a snapshot to determine which stakeholders they are sharing portfolio content with. Managers are leveraging snapshots for investor relations, client communication, and providing portfolio transparency to allocators. The snapshots functionality is one of the many ways Novus is ushering in a new, digital era for institutional investors.

• Fund Uploader: Novus clients can now upload fund data directly to the Novus Platform and easily analyze it. This includes the upload of manager data and watchlist data without any Novus intervention, as well as the creation of “paper portfolios” and PnL simulations.

• Daily Balances & Transactions: With monthly manager data, allocators risk missing crucial insight from intra-period data. Both liquid and illiquid cash flows are now visible on the Novus Platform at a daily frequency to allow added visibility into intra-month changes and derive more accurate performance metrics.

• Fund Attribution: With this enhancement, Novus clients are able to measure how much of their portfolio performance comes from asset allocation versus manager selection decisions. With this feature, clients can decompose contribution into allocation, selection, and interaction effect. Through this feature, clients can ask questions about the value of an asset allocation choice, which manager is right to express asset allocation targets, and if actual asset exposures are in line with client targets.

• Control Panel: Novus clients can update their settings for all components within a given tab simultaneously, change portfolio, date range, grouping, aggregation, direction, exposure, and more, on the fly. Through this function, each tab becomes a specific lens of analysis, which clients can use to answer questions with a single click.

About Novus Partners

Novus is a portfolio intelligence company that solves the unique data and analytics challenges facing capital allocators and hedge fund managers, offering best-in-class solutions for investors. All investment types—liquid and illiquid—are supported. Accessibility to sophisticated portfolio management, aggregation, and analytics is unmatched. Communication between stakeholders is made seamless. With simple data workflows and newfound data-driven insights, clients have the utmost confidence in their investment decisions. More than a decade ago, Novus invented the art of portfolio intelligence and now supports clients with a total AUM over $4 trillion from 4 offices around the world. With Novus, investors succeed. Learn more at novus.com.

CONTACT: Craig Allen Forefront Communications for Novus Partners 475-419-4468 callen@forefrontcomms.com