About Us
The AIRAS service has been created by Axiom Valuation Solutions (Axiom Valuation) and its principals, Dr. Stan Feldman and Roger Winsby, to bring fair value transparency to alternative investments. Since 2001, Axiom Valuation has provided a comprehensive range of expert valuation services for private businesses, illiquid securities, intangible and tangible assets for financial reporting purposes, and other hard-to-value assets throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Over the last few years, a number of institutional investors, including major endowment funds and pension funds, have sought our help in meeting their management and/or fiduciary responsibilities to sign off for their audit on the fair value of the alternative investments within their portfolios. Through these consulting projects, we have developed a methodology and a standard report that presents the information clearly to the investor and that provides a straightforward and replicable analysis for their auditor to easily test. Our clients are now able to meet fully their FAS 157 (ASC 820) responsibilities and their auditors are able to sign off at no risk on the values as well.
We have now taken the next step of making major investments in modeling systems and data sources to transform our consulting analysis model for reviewing fair values of alternative investments into a sophisticated and scalable replication product platform. That platform is the heart of AIRAS, the Alternative Investment Return Authentication Service. Our goal is to provide fund-specific and investor-specific AIRAS reports for investors in almost every hedge fund or private equity fund at a very reasonable and predictable price, and in a timely manner.
Lack of transparency around alternative investments continues to be a major concern among institutional investors. There are continuing reminders of investor risk from non-transparent investments from the on-going stories of the unwinding of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. A growing number of institutional investors are considering an initial or expanded use of alternative investments in search of better returns. AIRAS fills a critical, previously unmet need of providing reliable and cost-effective authentication checks on the returns reported by alternative investment managers. AIRAS should be the central element of every institutional investor's due diligence process for alternative investments.
