London-head-quartered asset management consultancy, MJ Hudson, has acquired fund and portfolio performance specialist PERACS. This acquisition follows closely the October 2020 acquisition (subject to Central Bank of Ireland approval) of fund distribution infrastructure and “super manco”, Bridge Group, in Dublin. The Bridge group acquisition added EUR120 billion of assets under advice or management, held in more than 400 structures, for more than 100 fund manager clients.
The acquisition of PERACS extends the services provided by MJ Hudson’s Data & Analytics division.
Founded in 2005 as a consulting practice of one of the world’s leading authorities in this field, Professor Oliver Gottschalg of HEC Paris, PERACS serves institutional investors and alternative assets fund managers, based primarily in Europe and North America. Its suite of performance metrics, based on the application of its proprietary tools created during more than 20 years of research on proprietary data, provides performance measures that can be compared across the entire industry and insights that are deeper and more reliable than other measures, such as IRR.
The PERACS services have applications in core areas for both fund managers and investors:
• they help fund managers articulate exactly how their performance is differentiated; and
• they support investors in their quest for best-in-class fund selection.
As a result of ongoing research and development, the company soon expects to launch a number of additional products and services, including cash flow forecasting and VAR (value at risk) tools. Research and the development of new models and tools are central to the PERACS business model and these endeavours will be further supported by the technical development team already in place at MJ Hudson.
The PERACS team, including Professor Gottschalg, will remain fully active in the business, which will trade under the name of MJ Hudson Fund Performance Analytics.
This is the fourth acquisition into MJ Hudson’s Data & Analytics division in two years, following the acquisition of marketing analytics business, Meyler in the US and Canada, in March 2020, ESG consultant and reporting business, Spring Associates Responsible Investor Services, in July 2019 and FX and custodian benchmarking analytics, Amaces, in December 2018.
The Data & Analytics division is now approximately one third of the broader MJ Hudson Group.
Odi Lahav, COO and head of MJ Hudson’s Data & Analytics division, says: “We are delighted that Professor Gottschalg and his team have decided to join the Group. He is well known to the senior management team at MJ Hudson and we have followed his firm’s progress with great interest, for a number of years. The acquisition adds yet more proprietary methods, models, and tools to MJ Hudson’s Data & Analytics division, supporting our ambition to bring greater transparency to the expanding alternatives industry. We have already identified a number of existing MJ Hudson clients who will benefit greatly from fund performance analytics and there are, likewise, PERACS clients that we can introduce to the wide range of services provided by MJ Hudson. Looking further ahead, the deal helps us to power the next generation of analytical software tools for our clients, built with machine learning techniques by our own developers.”
Professor Oliver Gottschalg, CEO of PERACS, says: “I am a long-standing admirer of MJ Hudson and its approach to the alternative assets market. With the additional resources and market platform this transaction affords, we will be able to accelerate the release of new tools and provide our clients with an even better service. In particular, the breadth and depth of MJ Hudson’s services and its international network both provide exceptional opportunities for growth.”
