October 17, 2024
Marketing Director
In our continuing series of interviews to gain better insights into private markets, we spoke with Jordan Rothberg, Co-Head of Private Equity Fund Administration, U.S. for IQ-EQ. Jordan boasts an extensive career in fund accounting and auditing, and prior to joining IQ-EQ spent time at SS&C Technologies as an Associate Director, and before that was a Senior Associate at PwC.
I oversee the U.S. Fund Administration business at IQ-EQ which provides administration services to alternative asset managers in the closed ended fund space (e.g. private equity, real asset, venture capital, private credit and debt).
IQ-EQ’s goal is to provide exemplary service to every single client. As such, the biggest challenges we face when it comes to servicing clients with timely and accurate reporting can be broken down into a few categories:
Fortunately, at IQ-EQ we have been successful in managing all three of the above matters which allows us to provide white glove, high touch services.
Critical staff leaving is an ongoing issue in the fund administration space. Whenever a critical team member leaves any organization, we seek to understand why they are leaving and how we can implement change to ensure more do not leave. We also combat the risk of critical staff leaving by ensuring that staff are properly trained on the IQ-EQ processes so that another person can immediately transition when a critical staff member leaves. Another way to combat disruption to our clients’ output is through the use of automation. At IQ-EQ, it is our goal to train and provide all team members with access to best-in-class technology, such as qashqade and Investran, to ensure that when critical staff leave, our clients do not experience any disruption to their services.
Leveraging systems to assist our team members with daily tasks is critical to our company’s success. The biggest advantage in using a dedicated waterfall software solution is that this removes any human error that exists with Excel files. At IQ-EQ, we have best-in-class technology in place to ensure that we can scale our product. While many firms may have these various pieces of technology in place, IQ-EQ’s goal is to connect them all to ensure that there is limited manual intervention. We have taken the time to robustly test qashqade as a dedicated software solution to ensure that we are not using tools like Excel which are prone to human error. Additionally, we have built out various checks through reports we can run out of qashqade to link Investran to the system to further automate our processes.
As the majority of our clients follow GAAP, we have to consider whether any new software we are implementing is following GAAP principles. Our goal with implementing new software is to ensure accuracy and efficiency; having to translate into GAAP compliant information doesn’t accomplish this goal. Ensuring we have smart technology in place that accounts for various GAAP principles is going to ensure our success from a fund administration perspective.
If someone is starting their career in either fund accounting or auditing, I would advise them to step out of their comfort zone and challenge themselves to get as much experience as possible with all different aspects of the job. It’s intimidating to try new things but doing so will not only demonstrate leadership and ambition, but it will also assist with learning new areas of the work. I would also encourage them to ensure that from day one, they are doing everything possible to learn the systems that their company is leveraging. Understanding these systems will help with daily work and will help them become invaluable to their organization.
