Gresham Technologies Looks to Asia for Growth

Gresham Technologies is looking to Asia to pick up new business, and is seeking to grow its resources in the alternatives space.

Ian Manocha, CEO of Gresham, says the company is increasing its investment activities in Asia and plans to expand its customer base in the larger financial hubs of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, but it will also look to reach out to regional banks in emerging markets.

“What we’re investing in, in Asia, is essentially sales and marketing at this stage; we have a delivery team out there already,” Manocha says. “So, now what we’re doing is building out sales and marketing in Asia, targeting the Singapore and Hong Kong markets, and we’ll head from there into Japan, where we already have some clients. And then there are some of the really interesting [growth] markets out there, like Vietnam, but it’s not a target market for us right now.”

Gresham will first build a hub in Singapore and branch out to other countries from there. The company declined to give specifics on how much it has already invested in the region. 

Gresham has support staff based in Singapore, Malaysia, and in Australia, as well as service delivery staff.

Alts Growth

In the US, Gresham is supporting firms with more alternative investments, like real estate, private equity, and infrastructure projects. 

Manocha says the company is signing more large institutional investors interested in managing data around their alternative investments. The challenge is that as larger investment firms look to expand their asset coverage in alternatives for hedging and alpha generation, it increases the amount of information that needs to be sifted through and reconciled.

“The more non-standard your data, the more complex systems and processes, the harder it is [to reconcile that information]. So what we’ve seen is the first wave was the hedge funds that were trying to do this with a room full of people and spreadsheets,” Manocha says. “What we’re now seeing moving up through the buy side is more and more firms are saying to us, ‘We can’t afford to have lots and lots of different technologies, so what we’re looking for is a category of software where there is a single infrastructure.’”