As part of its Digital Fund Series, KPMG Luxembourg hosted an evening event about new technologies in private equity and real-estate. Though waiting to come fully on the market, the technologies show promise to help private equity and real-estate thinkers better organize their accounts, cut down time spent in folders and excel, and avoid human-error mistakes made along the way.
Partner, Head of Asset Management, and Member of the Supervisory Board at KPMG, Ravi Beegun, opened the evening with the theme: “How technology can help higher-ups” on the background of the fundamental belief that cooperation will be key in the digitalized future. With limited resources, regulatory scrutiny, and taxes—including the new principal purpose test—, today’s private equity and real-estate managers must navigate tricky factors. The last thing they need is to spend enormous amounts of time in account details, scavenging folders for needed documents and wrestling with numbers in excel. Introduce the first speakers!
Taking the stage next were Jean-Christophe Cabilin and Christophe Diricks to talk about a new governance application. The solution is a remarkably simple yet powerful governance application to be available on the cloud or on client servers. It is capable of performing micro- and macro-level analyses while organizing documents related to tax, consulting, and auditing tasks for account managers. These solutions bring cohesion to the corporate structure of target institutions.
“As a fund manager or risk manager, the application will help you spend much more of your time making strategic decision.”
In addition to oversight management, the application helps in Board Packs compilation and dissemination. It has concentrated tools to manage KPIs, provides an app-internal communication stream to eradicate overwhelming emails, and a tool to help manage CSSF and tax regulations. For example, if a manager sets the capital of a Luxembourg company in USD in the system, the application will not only notify said manager that a USD tax functional currency request is necessary (indeed, tax accounts and tax returns should be filed in EUR) but will provide with the necessary official documentation and to whom that document must be filed. That’s a long sentence—but you get the point. The application cuts out time-intensive procedures so account managers can focus on what’s important—decision making.
But time-intensive tasks, of course, aren’t exclusive to private equity. Perhaps an even more difficult sector is real-estate management. Fund Managers have to manage often unpredictable factors that can change daily, including vacancy rates, rental rate changes, tenant information, among others. In fact, fund managers and risk managers spend 95% of their time calculating and re-calculating and 5% of their time making strategic decisions. KPMG understand this and has a bold statement: their portfolio management platform, bred from a conception of Real-Estate 3.0, proposes to flop these percentages. As a fund manager or risk manager, the application will help you spend much more of your time making strategic decision.
Stay with Silicon Luxembourg for updates on this technology!
