Know Your Funds

Know Your Funds (KYF) is a Dublin based provider of technology solutions to the European & UK investment management, asset owner and service provider industries. The KYF Platform is a modular system that includes data management and mapping, rules-based oversight via a proprietary rules engine, a look-through engine for multi-tiered funds and automated reporting. The platform delivers an ‘ESG Book of Record’ providing data backed evidence of risk management and compliance. The KYF Platform is a SaaS product hosted on AWS. It delivers the ability to enact continuous, granular ESG oversight over multiple individual funds or fund-of-funds whilst removing the administrative burden, and potential risk of human or system errors, of periodic manual checks. Whilst the platform is data-provider agnostic, it comes inclusive of LSEG ESG (previously branded as Refinitiv) and Lipper holdings data

The Challenge

Most investment institutions, whilst allocating vast budgets for raw ESG data currently conduct ESG oversight manually and episodically. In addition to being an inefficient use of staff and resources, this is prone to error and lack of completeness (Potential “Greenwashing”)

Many Asset managers, Fund Administrators, ManCos and Custodians are dependent on third-party assurances for oversight. Clients are unaware of the ESG status of holdings in externally managed collectives and Fund of Funds.

Regulators want ESG to be looked upon as a new risk class that needs to be treated in the same way as market risk, liquidity risk or operational risk. But systems capabilities available to the industry have not kept pace with the business needs to have an enterprise wide solution

The Solution

• KnowYourFunds is an automated ESG oversight and reporting platform enabling clients to check and record the adherence of their investments to user-defined sustainability criteria.
o A cloud-based SaaS solution requiring no IT integration.
o Data-provider agnostic with the LSEG ESG dataset included in the package.

• Our Look-Through Engine enables granular, scalable oversight of the holdings of externally managed collectives and multi-tiered Fund-of-Funds.

• Our Rules and Initiatives Engine enables users to build ESG alignment checks based on any of the 100s of metrics within the data provider’s dataset:
o Sector/industry/issuer negative screening.
o Revenue-/ownership-based activity thresholds.
o Thematic/aspirational portfolio-level targets e.g. WACI, carbon footprint

• These user defined ESG alignment checks are automatically run on every holding within the chosen investment universe.
o Adherence to the checks is recorded in the ESG Book of Record: an auditable, empirical, systematic, and ongoing compliance record.
o Exceptions are flagged via an alerts screen enabling further investigation and any potential remedial action.

• Our Report Generator automatically delivers regulatory (e.g. SFDR) and bespoke in-house reports.

• The Book of Record creates an auditable record of adherence and alignment with a portfolio’s sustainability goals.

• KnowYourFunds can deliver both a significant cost saving (35-60% FTE) and a superior oversight capability.

Summary:
The KnowYourFunds platform delivers best-in-class ESG oversight for our client institutions and the assurance that they are doing all they can to ensure that their actions match their words when it comes to the ESG characteristics of the investments under their stewardship.