Mercatus is excited to welcome Greg Brown to our growing team. Greg is a Boston area-based Program Manager and he brings years of experience implementing technology platforms for financial clients, most recently at BNY Mellon and previously at Eagle Investment Systems (now BNY Mellon Data and Platform Solutions). We recently sat down with him to learn more about his new role and what brought him to Mercatus.
What is your role at Mercatus?
As a Program Manager, I will be leading implementations and helping to drive our clients’ transition to our platform and solving their complex data integration challenges. I am hoping to leverage my experience in leading software implementations and solving business problems to help clients deploy the platform quickly and enable them to trust their data, improve operational efficiency, minimize risks, and make better investment decisions.
What is your career background / story?
Prior to joining Mercatus, I held various roles of increasing responsibility over the course of two decades in the professional services and consulting practice of Eagle Investment Systems (now BNY Mellon Data and Platform Solutions). In these roles, I gained extensive experience working with investment management firms around the globe deploying a full suite of data management, accounting, performance and data delivery products spanning a wide variety of data types, usage patterns and consumers.
In your past roles what are some unmet needs from private market investors around data management technology?
Several of the investment management firms that I worked with were limited partners that wanted to maintain an IBOR on their portfolios that included their private market holdings. In their current state, they relied heavily on using systems that were tailored to public markets and manual processes that were prone to error and inaccuracy. The biggest challenge they had was not having a centralized system to access the data from all of the general partners who were providing the data across disparate data types (i.e. PDFs, Excel, third party systems). The data collection and aggregation required to establish and maintain an IBOR on their private holdings was so manual and onerous that most clients would resort to plugging data, ultimately creating another silo of private market data that could not be trusted.
What excites you about Mercatus?
The opportunity to bring innovative, game-changing technology to the rapidly growing private markets sector while also working with an amazing team at a growing company where I can aspire to make a real contribution to its long-term success.
How do you see private market technology evolving over the next decade?
As private markets continue to grow rapidly and the competition ramps up even more, the technology used by fund managers to make better investment decisions and manage risk will be a difference maker. Technology providers will have to be adept at serving their client’s specific needs and help them scale their teams during this growth period with best-in-class technology.
What is your favorite / go-to Karaoke song?
“Beth” by KISS. My wife’s name is Beth and I assume she will be in the room while I’m singing. KISS is one of my favorite bands and this is a song that doesn’t require too much singing talent, so it covers all my bases!
