The goal is to enhance the experience for asset owner clients that invest in complex private market and unlisted assets.
Northern Trust has launched a machine learning-powered document capture capability as the foundation of a multi-year investment to digitize alternative asset servicing.
The digitization of documents will streamline historically manual workflows by automating the receipt and processing of alternative asset documents and fund manager reports on holdings and performance of hedge funds, private equity and other alternative assets.
Northern Trust’s proprietary solution combines robotic process automation and cloud-based technology to provide transparency and data standardization that enables greater understanding of portfolio risk and performance.
Pete Cherecwich, President of Corporate & Institutional Services at Northern Trust, said: “As alternative asset classes continue to grow in importance to institutional investors, Northern Trust is committed to driving efficiency and reducing operational risk through the use of emerging technologies. Digital document capture is a huge step forward, and only the start of our larger plan to enhance alternative asset servicing for the benefit of our clients.”
The intelligent document capture solution deploys custom-built robotic process automation that enables self-service operations to collect documents from emails, whether in the form of download link or within the email text.
Documents are stored on a cloud-based drive where intelligent tools extract identifying details such as the type of document and the name of the fund company, tasks previously performed manually.
Alternative asset servicing teams will be able to focus on more strategic aspects of the process and reduce time spent on manual intervention when coordinating saving, storage and categorization.
Asset owners can also benefit from faster servicing of their assets and deeper data insight provided through artificial intelligence.
This is the first in a series of releases supporting Northern Trust’s strategy to harness emerging technologies to digitize alternative asset servicing.
The announcement comes a year after the appointment of Alison Pain as Chief Technology Officer for its operations in the EMEA region.
Based in London, Ms. Pain is in charge of providing leadership and guidance to planning, organization, direction and control of its enterprise technology business units across said market region.
