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We are thrilled to share some incredible news with you all. Noviscient has been shortlisted for the esteemed Asset Manager of the Year award at the upcoming Asia Capital Markets Awards. This recognition is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and innovation that define our approach to asset management.

A few years ago, as the chief risk officer at an Asian alternative investments firm, Scott Treloar found himself in an unexpected situation.The company, which had been managing over US$5 billion, was trying to raise capital for hedge funds. Treloar thought it would be a breeze.Much to his surprise, no one was interested – and they failed to raise any money.Investors said they weren’t keen on hedge funds, as those had been performing poorly for the past decade. In 2019, fund managers underperformed in the S&P 500 Index – a commonly used benchmark – for the ninth consecutive year.

Noviscient, a Singapore-based alternative investment shop, is crowdsourcing independent systematic traders and packaging them into a hedge fund.The aim is to use APIs and a computerized risk model to create a vehicle that strips out almost all of the costs associated with hedge funds, while providing a business opportunity for quants with clever ideas.“I’m not paying portfolio managers,” said Scott Treloar, founder. “They only get paid if they perform.”He says Noviscient is not a matching service: it’s a “platform fund”. He’s not putting fund managers together with institutional investors. “The value is in selecting who has got alpha,” he told DigFin. “We allocate to managers doing well and weed out those doing poorly. ”There is plenty of talent out there, people coming out of investment banks or other funds who want to apply their quant expertise to portfolios, but the high capital requirements to start a hedge fund tend to strangle most of these efforts.

The traditional hedge fund model is no longer working. Performance is poor. Costs are high. Alignment is low. It needs to change. The three forces driving this need for change are:Increasing costs as regulators and investors demand higher operational standardsPressure on fees as investors are become more sophisticated and expect more for lessGreater competition making the markets more efficient and fragmenting available alph.