First – everyone at Castle Hall hopes that you, your families and your colleagues are all safe and well in these challenging times.

Covid-19 (Coronavirus) is impacting us all across the asset management industry, creating unheralded business challenges. Castle Hall has moved quickly to provide new sources of information on Covid, and build new diligence solutions – including a free Covid-19 diligence report.

FREE DiligenceExchange COVID-19 Reports

• Castle Hall will introduce a dedicated Covid-19 due diligence report during the week of March 23. This will be FREE OF CHARGE to all Castle Hall clients.
• At your request, we will circularize all managers with key Covid-19 questions (work from home status, cyber protections, key person risks, status of service providers etc.) Responses will be available on DiligenceHub.
• Managers will be able to share their responses with other investors – at this time of crisis, exchange of consistent diligence information between managers and investors is critical, avoiding duplicative requests.
• Our Covid-19 reporting will be updated regularly as the situation changes, with thematic or general update questions sent to managers as needed.

FREE DiligenceExpress Covid-19 Risk Profile

• You can use DiligenceExpress to check any SEC registered manager and fund. Where are the manager’s offices and what are their resources (headcount and AUM)? You can also use DiligenceExpress to identify the service providers for every fund entity: we feel that breakdown of service provider capability (especially administrators) will be a key risk over the coming weeks.

Castle Hall can also help:

• Reputational Due Diligence (RDD): track all your managers’ news across thousands of media sources. Is a manager in the news due to a Covid-19 infection?
• Audited financial statement reviews: monitor funds for changes in their net assets, high levels of leverage or Level 3 assets – or delays in issuing the accounts. 
• OpsMonitor – review all manager communications, including manager letters related to Covid-19.
• Dedicated Covid-19 diligence. We have already received inquiries regarding dedicated Covid-19 diligence, involving Castle Hall discussing procedures with managers and preparing a detailed Covid-19 diligence analysis.

Again, everyone at Castle Hall greatly appreciates our partnership and the confidence you have placed in our due diligence in the past. We look forward to helping support you and your team over the coming weeks: in these challenging times, please don’t hesitate to reach out if there is anything our team could do to help you and your colleagues. We’re all in this together, and everyone at Castle Hall is ready to provide any help we can.

Chris Addy
CEO