Michele McGovern helped launch the San Francisco-based Resultant Capital Partners, a US equity, long-short, market neutral money manager in May 2010. She joined as partner and chief operating officer (COO), working alongside Resultant founders Jeffrey Skelton, managing partner and CEO, and Michael Henman, partner and head of business development; Skelton and Henman are the former founders of Symphony Asset Management. McGovern has known Skelton and Henman since their days at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, approximately 25 years ago.McGovern has 15 years of experience in operational infrastructure issues for buy-side firms, particularly in order management systems, transaction platforms, and accounting systems. The trio spent six months setting up the infrastructure, operations, and the portfolios before launching Resultant’s first fund in February. Resultant is using the private cloud computing services of the Abacus Group for its IT infrastructure.
How did you get involved with the new firm?
“I was at PriceWatershouseCoopers when it was Coopers & Lybrand and Wells Fargo Investment Advisors was my audit client. Over the years, I did a number of things, including consulting to buy-side firms and then went on to run companies that sold software to the buy side and sell side. Our paths [Skelton and Henman] kept crossing and when they decided to start this firm, they asked if I wanted to join them and be part of the founding team and take responsibility for setting up the business infrastructure and the financial aspects of the firm.”
Do you have a background in operations?
“I’ve been running companies that sell software to run the operations of hedge funds.”
Do you have any infrastructure separate from what you’re doing with Abacus?
“We have our own client technology—desktops and multiple trading screens in our trading room. … I didn’t look at it as: ‘We don’t want to invest in the infrastructure.’ We sat down and asked, ‘What make the most sense?’ It’s more about how to do this more quickly and effectively, and do it with business partners who are spending all of their time managing the infrastructure.”
“When you’re in an emerging firm, people wear multiple hats. So the person who’s going to run the technology is probably going to do other activities and other jobs at the firm as well.”
“This team has previously been successful at building a firm and we wanted to start off being able to have dedicated teams, partners we could work with that were experts in their field. Not only does Abacus have the production environment but they have the disaster recovery environment as well. … When you’re going through due diligence with an investor and they want to know, ‘This is great that you’ve got this production environment. What do you have for DR and backup?’ To have all that set up to the level and the quality that the big institutional investors expect, and to make people feel comfortable requires dedicated resources.”
“Most recently, we brought Eze Castle software online—Abacus is hosting that for us. We lease the software but it’s running on Abacus’ servers. Abacus has people on the West Coast and the East Coast monitoring that 24 by 7.”
Have you encountered hints from regulators that they will be reviewing your cloud implementation?
“We haven’t yet but I fully expect that at some point we will. I think that’s actually a good thing. The more that this stuff becomes a standard part of the way people work in this industry I think more people will embrace it. More people will be offering services like this and that’s good.”
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