Nasdaq’s acquisition of Dasseti, a due diligence and monitoring platform, extends the exchange and data company’s interests in private markets and highlights the growing importance of the sector to capital markets investors.
The deal, which was completed in September, will see the artificial intelligence-powered tools of Dasseti integrated into Nasdaq’s eVestment business, and rolled out across its client base of almost 5,000 consultants, institutional investors and asset managers. It will provide data to more than 1,200 asset owners as they look for the best managers of their assets.While the acquisition covers public markets, its inclusion also of private market asset owners and managers marks the beginning of the “next chapter” for the company as it bolsters provisioning for multi-asset investors, said Daniel Brickhouse, Head of eVestment at Nasdaq.
“Dasseti have done some really interesting things in the asset manager space, helping asset managers tell a cohesive story in an efficient way to those audiences, so it’s a really good fit for our clients,” Brickhouse told Data Management Insight.
“We’ve been in the alternative space since 2011 when we started offering hedge fund data and we’ve been offering private market solutions for more than 10 years so we are very much a multi-asset class offering. ”
Attractive Buy
Dasseti was an attractive acquisition for Nasdaq eVestment because its platform covers 17,000 asset managers and general partners (GPs) representing US$34 trillion in assets under management. Added to eVestment’s existing private markets coverage, the combined companies now includes more than 16,000 managers and 95,000 funds.
The platform aids asset owners in their search for suitable managers by applying due diligence questionnaires, requests for proposals (RFPs) and monitoring to help asset owners assess how managers are operating and performing.
The service is of particular importance to private asset investors because data from the space has been traditionally sparse, irregularly reported and often of poor quality. Nasdaq eVestment said Dasseti’s capabilities, are now integrating with its own, and will enable improved response times and improve the calibre of the data.“We are creating a more unified way and a seamless way to do some of the work that historically has been done in a very fragmented and manual fashion,” said Brickhouse. He added that eVestment’s nearly three decades of overlapping work with asset owners and managers would be strengthened by the Dasseti purchase.
“It’s a 360-degree view of the manager, both from an external perspective and also your internal house view on that manager.”
Data Integration
At the moment, Dasseti’s data bases will exist separately from those of eVestment, although clients of each will be able to access both datasets in what Brickhouse describes as a “mosaic of sources”. Data collected via Dasseti’s questionnaires is proprietary to Dasseti’s clients and is distinct from the data eVestment creates.
Nasdaq, will however, look at ways to integrate the two datasets.
“We will be… going deep into the client base, understanding their needs and looking at where it makes most sense to bring data across from one side to the other for an individual user,” Brickhouse said.
While Dasseti adds AI capabilities to eVestment’s capabilities, Brickhouse said further enhancements of its services using the technology are also in the pipeline, to fill what he described as, “a gap in the ecosystem for clients”.
“We’re hearing from managers already that they see a world where there’s a single point of entry and they can tell their story one time and then they can determine where that message goes in market,” said Brickhouse. “We see a ton of opportunity to make clients’ lives easier in the asset manager space where right now they’re moving a lot of data from one place to another manually.
“It’s really about supporting the full manager research due diligence and monitoring lifecycle. That’s our North Star – providing one seamless platform to support your entire manager research process end-to-end. That’s what we’re very focused on for the asset owner.”
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