Over the past decade, the multi-manager fund has reshaped the alternatives landscape.
These funds—also known as multi-PM or multi-strategy—give investors access to a diversified mix of specialized managers, asset classes and strategies. By combining multiple sources of expertise, multi-manager funds can deliver strong returns with lower volatility, serving as a one-stop shop for investors.
For alternative firms, the breadth of strategies offered by multi-manager funds positions them as comprehensive investment providers and helps them capture a larger share of client portfolios.
As a result, the popularity of multi-manager funds continues to grow.
According to Goldman Sachs, assets under management in multi-manager funds nearly tripled from 2017 to 2023.
Reinforcing the model’s appeal, the Multi-Manager Peer Group Composite returned 7.38 percent annually over 10 years ending March 31, 2024, versus 4.93 percent for traditional hedge funds.
But with scale comes complexity.
While your portfolio managers only need visibility into their own strategies, as the head of investment operations, you need centralized oversight across all strategies, orders and workflows.
Meeting that challenge requires the right investment technology. For many firms, that technology is an all-in-one system like an OEMS (Order and Execution Management System).
A modern OEMS gives you complete visibility across the central fund while enabling portfolio managers to operate independently, without disruption or friction.
In this post, we’ll explore 5 essential OEMS capabilities that help you onboard portfolio managers efficiently and equip them to execute with autonomy, while also giving you the tools needed to standardize operations, maintain compliance and scale your multi-manager fund with confidence.
From Oversight to Execution: The 5 OEMS Must-Haves for Multi-Manager Fund Operations
Based on what leading alternative firms are demanding today, these are the 5 core capabilities every OEMS should deliver to empower multi-manager operations:
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Quick and Cost-Effective Portfolio Manager Onboarding
Achieving success with your multi-manager strategy requires more than simply adding managers.
Your firm must equip those managers with the tools and infrastructure they need to generate, execute and manage their investment ideas effectively.
The right OEMS platform should make onboarding new portfolio managers fast and cost-efficient, while accommodating the managers’ wide range of asset classes and strategies.
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Transparency, Manager Autonomy and Multi-Strategy Insights
Multi-manager funds thrive on diversity of thought, style and strategy. However, autonomy only works when leadership has the transparency needed to manage risk and maintain operational discipline.
A fully synchronized investment platform like an OEMS bridges this gap, giving you a real-time, holistic view across all managers and strategies while enabling individual portfolio managers to operate and execute independently.
Equally important is the system’s ability to enforce information barriers and data privacy between managers.
And when it comes to reporting, firms need complete, accurate NAV data that can be rolled up holistically or sliced across managers.
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Unified Trading, Support for Diverse Strategies and Cost Efficiencies
Trading sits at the center of a multi-manager fund. However, complexity can scale quickly, with multiple managers executing diverse strategies at high volumes.
Whether your firm runs a centralized trading desk or allows portfolio managers to trade independently, your OEMS must be able to quickly turn managers’ investment ideas into orders and execute them efficiently.
This need for speed is true no matter what managers are trading: Equities, credit or fixed income – the platform must support them all, normalizing execution across diverse styles and feeding real-time P&L and exposures into a single source of truth.
Trades should be automatically allocated at the sleeve or strategy level and tagged by themes, strategies or mandates.
Look for an OEMS platform with flexible modeling tools and intuitive trade entry screens that make it easy for traders or managers to move from idea to execution.
A truly unified trading solution should seamlessly handle high volumes of orders, trades and executions across all managers. It should also include advanced EMS-style features — like complex pairs trading.
To reduce costs and improve efficiency, the right platform should also enable internal crossing and blocking and include trade automation capabilities. Together, these features free up portfolio managers to focus on generating alpha rather than managing manual processes.
Ultimately, supporting diverse trading styles on a single, scalable platform like an OEMS creates a more agile, manager-friendly environment without compromising control or cost.
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Robust Compliance and Risk Mitigation
With multiple portfolio managers executing diverse strategies across internal and external sleeves, compliance complexity increases dramatically.
Your firm must strike a delicate balance: Empowering managers with the necessary flexibility while enforcing firm-wide policies and regulatory standards.
To manage that complexity, your OEMS must deliver real-time, holistic visibility into compliance at both the strategy and fund level before, during and after each trade.
For investment operations teams, this means having a centralized system to monitor and enforce alignment with firm policies, investor mandates and evolving regulations such as Regulation SHO. A robust compliance engine should go beyond point-of-trade checks to support continuous monitoring, rule-based automation and real-time alerts.
The right system should enable you to set granular risk and compliance limits—by manager, strategy or fund. This ability ensures tailored oversight without manual intervention and can protect against breaches like zero-crossing — when a position flips from positive to negative — while preserving manager autonomy.
Granular risk limits can be set based on the needs of individual managers, investor mandates or fund-level guidelines. These settings help prevent overexposure while ensuring tailored risk oversight.
Ultimately, strong compliance capabilities help portfolio managers stay within bounds and empower operations teams to mitigate regulatory and operational risk, ensure auditability and scale the fund with confidence.
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A Portfolio Built on “Best Ideas”
In an active management model, great ideas are your greatest asset. For multi-manager funds, success often comes down to conviction—how strongly each portfolio manager believes in their highest potential trades.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, many managers have grown more cautious, layering in risk controls and defensive positions. As a result, the impact of high-conviction picks can sometimes be diluted.
That’s where a “Best Ideas” portfolio shines. The right platform should allow you to elevate your highest-conviction positions, selecting the top ideas from across your managers and auto-upsizing them based on pre-defined rules. Best Ideas provides a way to amplify what works while maintaining the structure and discipline of a multi-manager model.
Eze OEMS: Investment Technology to Manage and Scale Your Multi-Manager Strategy
Eze OEMS is a proven solution that meets the unique demands of multi-manager funds across asset classes, strategies and manager types.
Whether onboarding external portfolio managers, managing internal teams or running a hybrid model, Eze OEMS gives you the centralized control and real-time visibility needed to scale confidently.
With a unified system that connects your front, middle and back office, you can automate key workflows, monitor risk exposures, enforce compliance rules and support diverse investment styles without compromising oversight or efficiency.
For investment operations leaders tasked with maintaining order amid complexity, the OEMS turns operational challenges into a competitive advantage.
Learn more about the capabilities of the OEMS or contact us to learn more about managing multi-manager accounts.
