With no formal research management process or system in place, this New York based long/short equity fund sought a systematic research management solution that could remove data silos and help to institutionalize knowledge across the fund. However, finding one that was also simple to deploy and manage, and met analyst productivity demands for easy to use note-taking and mobility had previously proved a challenge…
The Legacy of Legacy RMS
A Research Management System had been near the top of the IT agenda at this fund for years. However, poor user experiences and low analyst adoption meant that its repeated efforts to implement a centralized approach to research never quite made it past first base.
The senior partner and many analysts at the fund had experience of traditional RMS and evaluated plenty of solutions. Yet they’d always found them complex to use – workflows felt cumbersome, mobile access was limited.
While the team wanted to replace its piecemeal approach to research – hacking individual workflows across shared drives, Word, Excel, Evernote, email and more – they knew that a move to a centralized RMS needed to support, not hamper, day-to-day productivity in order to be adopted.
Connected User Experience
In Bipsync the team found modern, mobile Research Management Software that analysts actually wanted to use. The team chose to implement Bipsync for its ability to tightly integrate a central research repository with easy-to-use note-taking and organization tools and its intuitive iOS app that let analysts securely create and access research on the move.
“The software was more streamlined, integrated and intuitive compared to others. It was immediately more usable than anything we’d seen before.”
– Senior Partner, $2.9Bn New York Hedge Fund.
Fast Deployment, Rapid Adoption
The Bipsync software was deployed in just days and within a week the first analyst team was using the platform as their go-to place to capture, find and analyze research information.
With Bipsync in place, analysts no longer worry about data management and back-ups that used to take up valuable time and introduce inaccuracies, while disjointed workflows that used to cause frustration are a thing of the past.
“Analysts were saving time right across the research process – capturing, creating, finding and analyzing information – so it was only a matter of time before other teams noticed and wanted in.”
Regular user onboarding and feedback sessions saw the number of analysts on the platform grow consistently month on month. Today, all investment professionals at the fund rely on Bipsync for their research. These consistently high levels of analyst adoption and usage has not only served to remove data silos, but also supports the fund’s compliance posture with a more complete audit trail of its logged research activity.
The RMS has also gone a long way to help the fund realize its objective of institutionalizing knowledge. All research is centralized, accessible and organized, with team members actively using the sharing features to collaborate on ideas. In fact, with Bipsync in place, the fund has been able to launch a new internship program, confident that short-term research efforts can provide long-term value to the fund, as well as the intern, long after their placements come to an end.
The fund continues to scale and, placing a high value on its research and idea generation as a competitive differentiator, next plans to explore the process management features of the Bipsync platform to further streamline its research operations.
If you’re looking to ditch the data silos at your fund, or would like to learn more about how firms like this are powering their research process with the Bipsync platform, get in touch.
