Bahrain sovereign wealth fund, with $9 billion in assets, deploys eFront system.

Providers of investment software are extending their presence in the Middle East, with nations such as Bahrain ramping up technology for sovereign wealth funds.

Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat) has selected eFront’s FrontInvest Alternatives to support its alternative investments operations.

Mumtalakat is the investment arm of the government of Bahrain’s strategic non-oil and gas related assets and holds stakes in over 35 commercial enterprises, representing a portfolio value of more than USD 9 billion.

“Our success in this part of the world, and more particularly with the very demanding Sovereign Wealth Funds clients such as Mumtalakat, will allow us to expand and leverage our success towards other private equity companies and alternative assets investors operating in the Middle East,” Tarek Chouman, managing director, Middle East & Asia at eFront, told Markets Media.

Mumtalakat’s investment strategy is to create a well diversified and balanced global portfolio across asset classes and geographies to generate long term financial growth for Bahrain.

“Mumtalakat wanted a proven, flexible and rich solution, that included the market’s best practices, to support its internal and investment processes and to generate in real time comprehensive and innovative dashboards and reports to the management team and beyond,” said Chouman.

FrontInvest will enable Mumtalakat to manage, monitor, and assess the performance of its investments within a single platform.

“A key requirement was to share among its front to back teams quantitative as well as qualitative information related to their existing  portfolio of assets or attached to future investment opportunities,” said Chouman.

FrontInvest Alternatives is the global frontrunner in alternative asset management platforms.

eFront’s new partnership with Mumtalakat affirms its dedication to creating an established presence in Bahrain and in the Middle East. eFront has been doing business in the Middle East since 2006 and opened its Dubai office in 2008 to better serve its client base in the region.

“We have been investing since then in our people and sales efforts and we consequently succeeded in few years in earning a total leadership position in this region,” said Chouman. “More than 15 clients across 6 Middle Eastern countries trust our solutions and rely on more than 25 consultants operating locally.”

FrontInvest is an investment management solution covering multiple alternative assets such as private equity, real estate, fund of hedge funds as well as listed equities in a single platform.

FrontInvest supports the investment process with features designed on the basis of the latest trends and best practices of the industry and implemented on advanced technologies, said Chouman.

“What makes eFront’s offering unique,” he said, “is its analytical platform integrating pre-built analytical dashboards with advanced cash-flow forecasting capabilities and aggregating data sourced from multiple origins, hence allowing strong decision-making analysis of data and pre-configured performance metrics.”