CAIS and BNY Mellon’s Pershing unveil new features to streamline alternative investing

By Edlyn Cardoza

CAIS, the leading alternative investment platform, and BNY Mellon’s Pershing, a leading provider of clearing and custody services, recently announced a series of updates to its platform that will seek to enhance alternative investment product access and order processes as broker-dealers and financial advisors allocate to new asset classes on behalf of their clients.

“Outdated manual processes have been one of the major barriers to alternative investment fund allocation for the independent wealth management community,” said Matt Brown, Founder and CEO of CAIS. “As access to alternatives goes mainstream, our collaboration with Pershing highlights CAIS’s ongoing commitment to supporting advisors as they transact, and report on, the full spectrum of alternative investments.”

The expanded partnership between CAIS and Pershing offers a new level of integration that seeks to make investing in alternatives faster, more secure, and convenient for advisors. Among its new features is the automation of submitting order forms, enabled by API connectivity between CAIS and Pershing’s NetX360® investment platform. Eliminating the need for manual order entry is intended to lower the risk of transfer errors or lost forms, increase data security, and reduce the number of steps required by advisors, investors, and fund providers.

“We are pleased to expand on this partnership with CAIS that will enhance the alternative investing capabilities being offered to advisors,” said Justin Fay, Director, Global Strategy and Product Management, BNY Mellon’s Pershing. “As investor demand for alternatives continues to grow, our priority is to make all aspects of the process more efficient and less time consuming.”

The updates build on CAIS and Pershing’s existing partnership, which automated manual transaction and documentation processes to reduce human error potential and improve advisors’ ability to browse, research, and allocate to alternative investments. The alternative investment platform has also introduced Single Sign-On (SSO) for broker-dealers and RIAs working with Pershing. The authentication scheme should allow users to securely access independent software applications using a single set of credentials. CAIS anticipates that the result will be improved time management, lower IT costs inside advisory and brokerage firms, and mitigation of risks tied to enterprise fragmentation.

CAIS offers broker-dealers and financial advisors a complete end-to-end platform solution or a customised, modular service for specific advisor-sourced funds and strategies. Financial advisors and independent broker-dealers who use CAIS via Netx360® also have access to CAIS IQ, a proprietary learning system that helps users learn faster and retain information longer. Private funds available through CAIS undergo independent investment and operational due diligence performed by Mercer.

This announcement follows CAIS securing over $325 million in growth capital from Apollo, Motive Partners, Franklin Templeton, Reverence Capital Partners, Stone Point Ventures, and Hamilton Lane, which values the Company at more than $1.1 billion.