Alter Domus, a leading provider of integrated solutions for the alternative investment industry, is enhancing its European service offering by making substantial investments in its central operations.

The initiative is focused on building additional technology capability, expanding its European footprint, and continuing to recruit exceptional, multilingual talent to support Alter Domus in providing corporate and fund services to investors and managers in private equity, real assets, and debt capital markets.

Launching an Ambitious Digital Agenda

At the core of its €50 million investment is technology. Alter Domus is pursuing an ambitious digital agenda in software development, network and infrastructure, security and systems engineering, and quality assurance.

This complements the rollout of new client-facing technology, CorPro, digitalising investors’ and managers’ traditional workflows to significantly improve access to data and achieve efficiencies across different geographies, funds, and product types.

This in-house technology was enhanced with the acquisition of London-based SaaS platform, Credit-Vision, whose solution for corporate credit investors was vertically integrated into Alter Domus’ technology stack during 2021. 

Scaling via European footprint

In addition to expanding its Irish operations in 2021, Alter Domus opened its doors in Lithuania and now benefits from operations centres in Cork, Vilnius, and Malta to house central operations as well as functions including technology and HR. In Ireland and Lithuania alone, Alter Domus has hired more than 200 new employees in 2021. Luxembourg continues to play a critical role in knowledge sharing to Alter Domus’ new operations centres as it remains a leading European centre of excellence. 

Exceptional, Specialised Talent

Across Europe, Alter Domus plans to hire an additional 270 technology, accounting, legal, compliance and tax specialists in Luxembourg, Cork, and Vilnius in 2022, to scale across the continent.

This will support Alter Domus in capturing the growing demand for incremental outsourcing as global alternatives investment managers in North America and Asia – who have an estimated $2.5 trillion[i] in dry powder to deploy – increasingly look to Europe to launch and manage new funds.

Alter Domus has fully deployed a hybrid working model and benefited from a greater appetite amongst exceptional talent to switch functional roles since the beginning of the pandemic. Those alternatives specialists seeking to switch are demanding a more technology-centric role without losing their sector expertise.

Through a proprietary training program, The acADemy, Alter Domus employees are enhancing their technical, professional and leadership skills. 1,800 Alter Domus employees in 13 European locations have already benefited from The acADemy, amounting to over 30,000 hours of training delivery.

Sandra Legrand, Regional Executive for Europe at Alter Domus, said: “In a year when Alter Domus has topped $1 trillion in assets under administration, we have in place the strongest technological capabilities and expanded our talented central operations team to support our clients and the rising complexity of their assets.”

“Our technology investment programme is strengthening our ability to help alternatives investors and managers grapple with a data deluge. Our technology is optimising managers fund and portfolio performance when they’re raising, managing, and deploying funds, and reporting this all back to their end-investors to overcome the intricate web of regulatory and compliance requirements.”

Heather Crowley- Kerr, Head of Central Operations Europe at Alter Domus, said: “Fund administration is a people industry increasingly defined by digital transformation. Whilst we’re automating our processes to serve our clients more efficiently, we’ve more than doubled our workforce in central operations since 2016 to maintain our hybrid operating model which blends human with digital.”

“Through an internal knowledge transfer system, we’ve exported some deep technical knowledge and experience that sits within Luxembourg and Malta to two additional hubs in Cork and Vilnius which now employ over 350 people. In the last year, we’re proud to have trained over 175 employees in the entire alternatives product lifecycle, so we retain our competitive advantage in being the only fund services and asset administration provider solely dedicated to providing superior expertise to private equity, credit, real estate and infrastructure investors and managers.

We look forward to our continued growth within our central operations and to welcoming additional talent to join us on the Alter Domus journey.”

[i] Source: Preqin (as at November 2021) North America = $1.778 Tn and APAC = $0.762 Tn of dry powder