Earnings calls, management meetings, expert network calls, manager meetings, corporate access, conferences, webcasts and more. That can mean hundreds of interactions a month for analysts, PMs and investment professionals.
All of which need to be scheduled, tracked, attended – some with pre-approval from legal. Each interaction also has to be documented both for compliance purposes and to capture, share and progress the insights from those calls and sessions.
The lack of physical events or in-person meetings during the pandemic may have limited travel-time, and networking opportunities for asset owners and asset managers, but it certainly hasn’t slowed the tide of critical interactions as part of the research process. It’s just put them all via your desktop.
Zoom fatigue is real. And it’s bad enough without the added cognitive burden of making sure your interactions are stored, information captured correctly, shared with the right team members or whether diligence tasks are updated.
Being able to automate much of this process, and to quickly find/ view upcoming or past interactions with associated content in a single system of record, is a serious efficiency boost.
And it’s why many funds are turning to Modern Research Management Systems (RMS); to enable them to automatically discover and report on calendar events, schedules and interaction history alongside their proprietary investment content, context and processes.
Automate and Organize Your Call and Meeting Processes
At Bipsync, we’ve released a number of new features to event, calendar and contact sync capabilities in recent product updates.
In short, you can now sync, organize and track calendar events, contacts and metadata in Bipsync from your external calendar, either on a per-event basis with Event Sync or at scale via our integration with Microsoft Exchange.
From there you can then automate note-types and configurable fields for required meeting notes and automate sharing, follow-up actions and reporting. Ultimately we’re focused on enabling you to easily and quickly link events and activities – manager meetings, specific earnings calls, memos, expert network calls etc. – and organize alongside your wider research processes, content and workflows.
Here’s a little more on the how for some common event sync workflows across our client base…
1. Sync Events with Tagging and Metadata Captured Automatically
In short, clients can sync, organize and track events and metadata in Bipsync straight from external calendars. The Bipsync system syncs your calendar events and automatically tags them and associated contacts to any (and many) objects in the RMS – companies, pipelines, geographies, industry etc.
We extract any tags that match the tagging syntax as well as attendees that exist within Bipsync and apply these automatically to the event, so you don’t even have to think of it.
2. Auto-Populate Metadata and Call Note Templates for Upcoming Events
Of course what goes with any meeting or call is your notes and ideas to document your activity and to progress the research forward.
You can dive directly in to content creation and note taking from the Bipsync calendar when a meeting or call begins – we automatically pull in all relevant metadata from the calendar event to the note that is created from it.
In the example below, we’ve created a note from an event and Bipsync automatically populated the attendee, location and meeting date fields on the note.
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Example event pop-up in Bipsync synced from external calendar -
Auto-populated note with tags and metadata created from synced event
3. Apply Rules to Automate Actions based on Events
Our Rules Engine can process changes to events too, which means that whenever one or more conditions occur, one or more actions can be automated.
So when an event is tagged to a particular ticker or fund, for example, or shared with a certain group, you can automate email notifications, create a new note, move an object into a new pipeline stage, set a task, and so on. Some common use-cases include:
- For Expert Network calls – here, a note template can be created automatically for an event tagged with a specific Expert Network provider. The system auto-populates configurable fields for that call type (contacts, industry, internal scoring etc.), and you can set tasks or notifications for any compliance diligence checks that need to occur.
- For Fund Manager intro calls – when a calendar event is synced into Bipsync and tagged as “Manager Intro Call”, for example, sharing the resulting meeting note with specific team members can initiate a rule to automatically move this Manager to the next stage of the pipeline, say “for legal review”, and notify the appropriate team of next steps.
The world really is your oyster when it comes to conditions and actions that optimize your fund’s own specific processes with Bipsync’s automation rules and events.
4. Launch Zoom Meetings In-App
Many of our users make use of Zoom to facilitate meetings, especially during times like these when many offices are closed and remote working is prevalent.
Recognizing this, and from our discussions with clients, we added a new feature in Release #173 for a Zoom integration. The RMS now detects links to Zoom meetings within notes or fields associated with notes, and makes it easy to launch Zoom for those meetings when links are detected.
Since our users are syncing events into Bipsync as their central repository, this allows them to easily catalog these important meetings and share them with other users on their team. When Zoom links are found within a note, a menu appears in the metadata toolbar which lists them – you can simply tap on a link to launch that meeting in a new browser window.
5. Tying It All Together
Synced events can be accessed from the calendar widget which appears on Bipsync dashboards, such as the Home dashboard.
Depending on your fund’s configuration preferences, you – or certain teams – may also choose to place a calendar widget on other Bipsync dashboards such as company records, contact records, or your specific pipelines. With the calendar widget in place and event syncing active, it’s simple to find, view and associate all your research activities tied to events. For example:
- Find research tagged to events: Our search capability allows users to find research which has been associated with a given calendar event. Simply search for an event and add its token to the search query to filter the search results accordingly.
- Filter calendar by company: You can filter Bipsync event calendars by one or more tags, such as a ticker, industry, fund or fund manager, to find specific items quickly or analyze interaction history and volume.
- Event and interaction reports: Customize reports for interaction history, or details of meetings attended within a given timeframe. This can also augment other workflows, such as highlighting any meetings that are missing notes or other key metadata such as an acknowledgment from the analyst that the content contains only public information.
- Pop-up event details: The design of the event details pop-up on the Bipsync calendar makes it easy to access the actions that can be performed on events, such as creating a new note tagged to that event, or viewing all notes tagged to that event.
And there you have it; a very high-level overview of Bipsync’s Event Sync capabilities. For more details just get in touch, and you can take a look at our rolling release notes relating to events right here on the blog.
