The areas every allocator should check before investing in a fund, and how to keep the evidence in one place. AlternativeSoft supports operational due diligence for 150+ institutions.
A live walkthrough tailored to your asset classes, followed by a 14 day free trial.
An operational due diligence checklist covers the non-investment risks of a fund manager: Governance and ownership, service providers, valuation and pricing, compliance and regulation, cyber security and business continuity, and cash and trade controls. Each area has questions to ask and evidence to request. AlternativeSoft helps allocators gather this evidence and keep it with the manager record.
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Work through each area for every manager, and keep the evidence.
Who owns and controls the firm? Check the legal structure, board oversight, key-person dependence and any conflicts of interest.
Confirm the administrator, auditor, custodian, prime broker and legal counsel, and how long each has been appointed.
Ask who values hard-to-price assets, how often, and how pricing disputes are escalated and recorded.
Review registrations, compliance policies, personal trading rules and any regulatory findings.
Check data protection, access controls, testing and the plan for keeping the business running in a disruption.
Confirm who can approve payments, how trades are checked and how independent the back office is from the front.
A checklist only helps if it is used the same way for every manager and the answers are kept. Many teams hold questionnaires, replies and documents in separate files. AlternativeSoft keeps operational due diligence beside the investment research, so the full picture of each manager is in one place.
Send a standard questionnaire and ask for policies, audited accounts and service provider details.
Work through governance, providers, valuation, compliance, cyber security and controls.
Check key answers with independent sources and record unanswered points.
Record the decision, then repeat the review on a regular cycle.
| Area | Spreadsheets and separate tools | AlternativeSoft |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | Different for each manager | A standard set applied to every manager |
| Evidence | Scattered across emails and folders | Kept with the manager record |
| Comparison | Hard to compare like with like | Answers read side by side |
| Follow-ups | Tracked from memory | Recorded with their outcome |
| Decision record | Rarely documented | Decision and reasons stored |
Operational due diligence assesses the business and control risks of a fund manager, as opposed to its investment strategy. It looks at the firm, its service providers, valuation, compliance and controls.
Investment due diligence examines the strategy, track record and portfolio. Operational due diligence examines whether the firm can run that strategy safely and reliably.
Most allocators review each manager on a regular cycle and after any major change, such as a new administrator, a key departure or a regulatory event.
Parts of it can. Questionnaires can be standardised and answers stored on one platform, which saves time and makes managers easier to compare.
Yes. A 14 day free trial is available after a demo, with onboarding support from our team.
Join the 150+ institutions that use AlternativeSoft to select and monitor their funds. A 14 day free trial follows your demo.
Operational due diligence rarely happens inside one tool. The analyst has the DDQ open in one window, the manager’s risk statistics in another and a draft committee memo in a third. AlternativeSoft MCP, now available with AlternativeSoft Cloud, puts the quantitative side of that work inside the AI assistant you already use. Ask Claude, ChatGPT or Microsoft 365 Copilot a plain-language question and the answer is computed on your own AlternativeSoft data, not generated from memory, so the numbers in your ODD report are the numbers in the platform.
“Summarise the key risk statistics for the three managers on this week’s ODD list, ahead of the investment committee.”
What comes back: Return, volatility, Sharpe, Sortino, maximum drawdown and peer rank for each manager, with a short read-out of the outliers, ready to paste into the committee memo.
“Has this fund’s drawdown or volatility changed since we completed its operational due diligence last year?”
What comes back: The statistics for both periods side by side, so a monitoring review takes a minute instead of an afternoon of exports.
“Which managers in our approved list have a maximum drawdown worse than 15 percent over three years?”
What comes back: The screen run live on your approved-managers group, the matching funds listed, and the context to decide whether a refreshed ODD is due.
Yes, for the quantitative side of the review. AlternativeSoft MCP lets Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot or any MCP-ready assistant ask the AlternativeSoft engine for a manager’s return, risk, drawdown, peer rank, stress test and factor exposure in plain language, computed on your own data. It complements the DDQ and document review in the Cloud ODD platform rather than replacing them.
AlternativeSoft MCP is available with AlternativeSoft Cloud and with the desktop platform. It is read-only, runs either server-hosted for web assistants or locally for desktop tools, and requires the REST API to be enabled and an MCP licence confirmed by support. Setup usually takes under an hour.