Alternative Investment Awards 2017

34 Wealth & Finance International - Alternative Investment Awards 2017 Wheatley Company: Watson Wheatley Contact: Tom Wheatley Email: [email protected] Address: 33 St James’s Square, London, SW1Y 4JS, UK Phone: 1608649641 Website: www.watsonwheatley.com AI170034 Watson Watson Wheatley are specialists in reconciliation for the securities industry. We invited COO Tom Wheatley to tell us more about the firm and the services it offers. Founded in 2007, Watson Wheatley is a reconciliation system vendor with worldwide clients including hedge funds, long only asset managers and commodities traders. Tom outlines the firm’s service offering in more detail and provides a fascinating overview of its creative platform iRecs. “Here at Watson Wheatley, we have become specialists in the reconcil- iation software solutions, working for alternative investment managers, and have proprietary software for data aggregation, reconciliation and reporting of operational data. We mainly work with hedge funds but also have asset managers, commodities traders, private equity firms and P2P lenders as clients. Originally our clients were UK based but we now have users in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York. “Our innovative iRecs system was originally built for GLG Partners and is designed to be as flexible as possible, easily add new reconciliations and reduce the requirement for additional headcount. We have devel- oped our system to behave more like a portfolio accounting system than a traditional ‘file to file comparison’ reconciliation system. We read data from any source, manipulate it, reconcile it and then display it within an accounting structure. Our policy is not to restrict access to data in the system like some rival systems but actively encourage clients to use the reconciliation data for other operational processes.” Looking ahead, Watson Wheatley’s clients face many challenges, as Brexit looks set to bring about increased regulatory and due diligence demands, as well as uncertainty in these areas due to Brexit. Despite this, Tom is confident that his firm will be able to support them through these challenges thanks to its dedication to compliance and the future proofing it has already undertaken, which will allow it to focus on grow- ing even further and building upon its current success. “Over the coming 12 months we anticipate sustained growth, continu- ing the trend for the last few years and expanding into other verticals such as P2P lending, private equity and commodities trading. Our main challenges are to hire the right people and keep our level of customer service consistently high. We have always relied on word of mouth rather than the marketing dollar to grow our business therefore having the best client relationships is a major priority for us.” Best Investment Practice Reconciliation Platform: iRecs