A Bermuda-based fund administrator, Apex Fund Services Ltd., has developed a new service allowing hedge fund managers and their investors secure online access to fund and investment data.

Apex is rolling out the new service ? ApexFundsNet.com ? to its clients at a time when more and more services are being developed for this lucrative sector in the grips of unprecedented growth.

Cash-rich investors, and increasingly institutions, charitable trusts, pension and endowment funds, have stepped up their investments in hedge funds, pushing the money under management into, by estimates, the $1 trillion region.

Until recently, these lucrative investment pools that generally offer better-than-market returns only attracted investments from wealthy, ?sophisticated? clients.

And the investments in hedge funds could reach $2 trillion by 2008, according to experts at the 2005 Reuters Hedge Fund and Private Equity Summit.

Hedge funds have attracted more investors partly because of pessimism about stock market returns, pushing many to look for alternative ways to grow their assets, a special KPMG report earlier this year found.

Now with the unprecedented flow of cash into hedge funds, fund managers and companies that service hedge funds are rushing to come up with ways to differentiate themselves from their competition ? and one key way companies are doing this is by boosting transparency and offering timely access to key measures of a fund?s performance.

Last month, Bermuda firm Amber Partners launched a service that assesses the operational controls of a hedge fund.

The service may bring peace of mind to investors worried about being burned, after a number of high-profile hedge fund collapses.

And now Apex, which as an administrator provides essential administrative services to hedge funds from accounting to recording shareholder information, is offering its clients a quick, convenient way of tracking a host of financial details.

The two-year old company last year upgraded its technological platform to integrate portfolio, accounting and share registry tracking by one system.

And now with ApexFundsNet.com, the information can be accessed through a secure web portal.

The portal was built by CorrectNet, a firm that works with asset management companies to automate access to streams of data.

ApexFundsNet.com is available exclusively to Apex?s fund clients and investors nominated to access fund information, depending on the level of access granted.

?Empowering the investor in this way allows the individual or institution to review performance reporting summaries, investment manager reports and fund documentation, offering memorandums and subscription documentation,? John Bohan, Apex manager of operations, said.

And investment managers can also use the Apex web portal to provide supplemental information to clients, such as monthly market summaries and investor messages.

Offering the service to investors is a powerful marketing tool for any fund manager, Mr. Bohan said, and pointed out that as most information is readily at hand, it can cut down on having to deal with time-consuming investor queries.

There is a cost for Apex clients to subscribe to the service, but Mr. Bohan called it ?nominal? especially in light of the ?huge amount of time? that can be saved.