Liberty Ermitage, who recently won Standard & Poor's 2005 Fund Management Awards in four offshore categories has, together with Panopticon's partner Kynetix Technology Group, developed a rigorous investment process where Panopticon's treemaps are used as the front end. The treemaps are used by the research and investment analysis groups extensively during the hedge fund management process.

Says Ian Cadby, CEO & CIO of Liberty Ermitage, "In the past we used a stand alone, rather static tool that gave us various statistics, but to analyse the vast amount of output required substantial time and effort. What made us decide to integrate Panopticon's solution was simply that it allows us to analyse a massive amount of data extremely quickly. By utilising Panopticon's software we can more efficiently manipulate, analyse and interpret the data. This allows us to spot investment opportunities in a more timely fashion."

"We are pleased that Liberty Ermitage has chosen Panopticon's treemaps to help meet the needs of a broad range of users in their investment process," said Willem De Geer, CEO, Panopticon Software.

One of the applications used for manager selection allows Liberty Ermitage to find a manager based on certain quantitative and qualitative parameters. The treemap allows the user to slice and dice the data and bring up those managers that match the requested parameters. The treemap is based on Panopticon's Enterprise Web Solution and allows Liberty Ermitage to jump to any of the other underlying data sources, including the quantitative and qualitative system.

On the strategy side, a treemap application is used to see what is going on in the hedge fund world. Previously, Liberty Ermitage had to rely on articles and Excel analysis which were both extremely time consuming. With the new application Liberty Ermitage can do a better analysis in shorter time.

Liberty Ermitage's advanced, proprietary in-house system - called Lewis - is built by Kynetix and feeds all data to Panopticon's treemap. Lewis provides rich quantitative analysis on over 5,000 hedge funds involving multiple investment strategies and sub-strategies. It is able to provide peer group analysis in seconds as well as detailed, publication quality fact sheets and reports.

The UK regulator, the FSA, has recently announced that Hedge Funds should have more transparency to their investment processes and decisions. Lewis and treemaps provide major advances in that transparency, allowing Liberty Ermitage to ensure liability and accuracy of the data at the same time.

The installation was completed within two weeks and the users have found the treemap applications fast and easy to understand; they are already seeing competitive benefits and anticipate a fast ROI.