Best Practices: Delivering Your Alternative Investment Data Into Reporting, Accounting, and Analytics Systems
As an OCIO or Investment Consultant, institutional investors hired you to outsource much of their investment decision making, and ultimately optimize performance within their portfolios. In your work, understanding the aggregate portfolio performance and reporting on it effectively is of vital importance, not only for transparency-sake but for timeliness and confidence in investment decision making. While this sounds basic, managing the various data sources, formats, and frequencies and creating a framework that works well for all alternative investments is extremely challenging.
A Complex Challenge
Many of our OCIO and Investment Consultant clients talk to us about the challenge of managing multiple clients and the valuation and transaction data associated with each. Similar to you, many of these clients have their own portfolio structures with large volumes of alternative investments across their entities and potentially their own clients.
All of this critical information needs to be recorded and managed from unstructured reporting documents and then delivered into the relevant systems for portfolio reporting, analytics, and accounting tasks. As you know, this is not easy to do at scale.
A Large Volume of Data to be Managed
Each of your client’s portfolios are different. New investments or commitments can be made every month, funds are redeemed from or expire. At massive volumes, your operational and reporting teams may struggle to stay on top of these changes. Often times, they may see the first capital call notice before the commitment information has even been funneled down to them. Making sense of an unending flood of documentation can be overwhelming.
Additionally, when a new client is brought on board, the need to process all of their historical data is an arduous and significantly time-consuming task. This can limit your firm’s ability to grow and scale in an efficient manner–simply hiring new individuals to manage more clients doesn’t make fiduciary sense in an environment of compressing fees throughout the industry.
A Number of Systems to be Balanced
Like most OCIOs and Investment Consultants, you may have multiple internal (and external) systems and document sources to manage. For any given client, you likely gather documents from multiple portals, save those documents into an internal drive, and may save the documents into a separate CRM or RMS system for the Investment or Research Teams. The process is riddled with manual, duplicative tasks.
After this initial document collection and triaging effort, you need to extract the data from these documents to run client reporting through systems like Investment Metrics, utilize an analytics tool like Solovis or Caissa for deeper insights for the Investment Team, and leverage Addepar, Black Diamond or Tamarac for performance and accounting analysis.
Additionally, depending on your client roster, some third-party systems cater to certain allocator types. If you work with or advise across Endowment, Foundation, Family Office, and Pension portfolios, numerous systems will likely be needed, and on top of this, you may have an in-house data warehouse or proprietary built reporting platform.
A Complete Solution
Canoe has developed a streamlined process for data management. In fact, it is the final step of the 5-step Canoe Optimized Workflow. Once your data is ingested, categorized, extracted, and validated, you can then deliver the relevant data elements into different analytics, reporting, and accounting systems. All you have to do is select your system(s) of choice, which ultimately saves countless hours of reformatting excel spreadsheets and keying data into multiple downstream platforms.
Canoe’s process saves you money and time by virtually eliminating monotonous, error-prone, and time-consuming manual data entry tasks. Leverage that time and cost savings into better client service and investment decisions, better using your employees’ time and expertise.
No matter your needs, Canoe’s system is agnostic and streamlines the ingestion, categorization, extraction, validation, and delivery process.
This new software from Canoe will significantly improve how OCIOs and Investment Consultants collect, collate, secure, and report data for their clients. Are you ready to learn more? Contact Canoe Software today to schedule a free demo.