Middle and back office operations.
The operational layer between the manager and the administrator — trade support, reconciliations, NAV oversight, corporate actions, AML and KYC, investor onboarding. The function most emerging managers cannot justify staffing in-house, delivered as a consulting engagement with senior oversight.
The team you'd hire — without the hire.
Most emerging managers run middle and back office on a wing and a prayer: the founder-PM does it, an under-resourced operations hire does it, or it does not quite get done. None of those work for institutional capital.
The institutional standard requires a real operations function: trades processed and reconciled daily, exceptions surfaced and resolved, corporate actions captured, NAV inputs validated, investor onboarding handled with proper AML and KYC discipline. At under $300M AUM, building this in-house is uneconomic. At $300-750M, it is possible but expensive. Above that, most managers have it.
Our middle and back office consulting solves the gap from under-$300M through to the point where building in-house makes sense. We do the work, but we sell the design and oversight that makes the work institutional-grade. The team is in Dubai, works in your time zone, and is reachable when something needs to be resolved before NAV strike.
What's actually covered.
A representative scope for a long/short or multi-strategy hedge fund manager. PE, VC, real estate, and credit configurations adapt — the principles stay the same.
- 01Trade support & lifecycle management
Trade affirmation and confirmation, trade allocation review, settlement instruction issuance, fail and exception management, and end-of-day trade summary preparation for the administrator.
- 02Reconciliation framework
Daily cash reconciliations across prime brokers and bank accounts, daily position reconciliations against custodians and prime brokers, weekly NAV input reconciliations against administrator records, with break aging and resolution tracking.
- 03Corporate actions processing
Mandatory and voluntary corporate action capture, election processing, dividend and interest accrual verification, and reconciliation against administrator and custodian records.
- 04NAV oversight & pre-strike review
Pre-NAV-strike review of administrator inputs: pricing, fees, accruals, capital activity, and exception items. Issues surfaced and resolved before NAV is final.
- 05Cash management & treasury support
Cash balance monitoring across accounts, payment processing under defined approval matrix, FX trade execution support, and capital adequacy monitoring.
- 06Investor onboarding & AML and KYC
Subscription document collection, KYC documentation review, AML screening (sanctions, PEP, adverse media), source-of-funds and source-of-wealth documentation, and ongoing periodic refresh cycles.
- 07Transfer agency coordination
Subscription, redemption, and transfer processing — either run directly or coordinated with an external transfer agent. Side-letter terms applied at the LP level, not in someone's memory.
- 08Corporate actions on capital — calls & distributions
For closed-end funds: capital call computation and notice issuance, drawdown collection tracking, distribution computation under waterfall mechanics, and recallable-capital management.
- 09Operational reporting
Daily, weekly, and monthly operational dashboards: positions, P&L attribution, exposure, exception aging, and cash coverage. The information needed to manage operations actively, not just measure them retrospectively.
Between the manager and the administrator.
A clean way to understand where M&BO sits operationally, and what each party is accountable for.
Investment process
Investment decisions, trading, portfolio construction, risk management, investor relationships, capital raising. The intellectual core of the firm.
Operational layer
Trade lifecycle, reconciliations, corporate actions, AML and KYC, NAV input oversight, operational reporting. The work that bridges between trading and books-of-record.
Books & records
Fund accounting, NAV calculation, capital activity processing, financial statements, regulatory reporting. The independent books of the fund.
Common questions on this practice.
How does this differ from fund administration?+
Fund administration is the books-and-records function for the fund itself — striking NAV, processing capital activity, producing the financials. Middle-and-back-office services sit upstream of administration and on the manager's side of the line. We process trades, manage corporate actions, run reconciliations, oversee NAV inputs, handle AML and KYC, and act as the operational team the manager does not have in-house. The administrator and the M&BO function are complementary, not substitutes.
Can you operate alongside our existing administrator?+
Yes — that is the standard configuration. We work alongside Apex, Citco, IQ-EQ, Waystone, Trident, or any other administrator. The administrator processes the books; we run the operational layer between the manager and the administrator — making sure trades, valuations, and capital activity flow cleanly into the administrator's process and that exceptions get resolved before they hit the NAV.
Do you handle AML and KYC and investor onboarding?+
Yes, where it sits with the manager rather than the administrator. Onboarding documentation collection, KYC validation, AML screening, source-of-funds documentation, ongoing periodic refresh, and adverse-media monitoring. For managers using a transfer agent, we coordinate with the TA; for managers handling investor onboarding directly, we run the function end-to-end.
How are middle-and-back-office engagements priced?+
Two structures. Activity-based pricing — per trade, per investor, per reconciliation — works for managers with predictable volumes. Fixed monthly retainer pricing works for managers wanting cost predictability and willing to commit to a defined scope. Both are sold as consulting engagements, not hourly outsourcing arrangements. We size the engagement after a discovery call and a review of recent operational volumes.
What kinds of funds do you support operationally?+
Long/short equity, multi-strategy, credit (long and short), private credit, private equity, venture, real estate, fund-of-funds, and digital asset funds. Different fund types stress different parts of the M&BO function — equity long/short stresses trade processing and reconciliations; PE stresses capital calls and waterfalls; credit stresses corporate actions and pricing. We adapt the operational design to the fund.
Is the team based in the UAE?+
Yes. The team supporting UAE managers operates from our Dubai office at DSO-IFZA. Time zone overlap, regulatory alignment, and physical proximity matter for fund operations work — particularly when something needs to be resolved before NAV strike or before an investor reporting deadline.
A review of operational readiness.
A discovery call costs nothing. We'll look at where things are now, what is likely to break under volume, and whether outsourcing the operational layer makes economic sense for your fund.