Back-Office Staffing Difficulties To Continue
written by Cory Levine, courtesy of WallStreet and Technology In 2008, fund companies can expect continued -- if not amplified -- difficulty staffing the back office, according to industry observers. Hedge fund and mutual fund operations continue to grow along with the business, but the difficulty in manning these operations and accounting departments is increasing, experts suggest. "A lot of our clients [are] having difficulty finding and retaining staff in administration," says Kirk Botula, EVP and COO of Confluence, a Pittsburgh-based automated data management solution provider to the investment management industry. "One of the challenges is that there has been a lot of product proliferation [in the fund industry]. With new products, there are new domains of knowledge where there's sudden demand and where it's difficult to find expertise." In a survey of more than 500 CFOs at direct-investment hedge funds with a least $100 million in assets under management conducted by executive search firm Rothstein Kass (New York), 69 percent of respondents reported that they have had difficulty retaining back-office personnel, according to Confluence. This jumps to 75 percent for firms with more than $3 billion in AUM. Further, 60 percent of firms believed they already were understaffed in the back office. According to Botula, many back-office workers quickly move on and up within their firms or the industry. Fund companies "have to assume now that their workforce is highly mobile and they won't stay long in a particular position," he says. The solution, Botula contends, is to build expertise into the technology surrounding a job function. "You want to drive expertise into the system and out of the user," he explains. By automating complex processes that require rare expertise, firms not only will be able to thrive with reduced back-office staffing, but skilled knowledge workers will be free to leave the back office and move into higher-value opportunities within a firm, Botula adds. |
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