Allocators demand a robust, repeatable approach to manager research, selection and diligence. This Fund-of-Funds (FoF), one of the world’s largest and most established, is no different.
Looking to embed structure into its investment professional’s processes to increase consistency and efficiency, the firm sought a front-end system that would harness workflows, automate research practices and help standardize processes across its investment lifecycle.
Following an in-depth market evaluation of research management systems, it became clear that Bipsync and it’s highly-configurable research platform for allocators was the best fit to support the unique process controls, research workflows and team requirements across the fund.
The 40-strong investment team was able to get value from the Bipsync SaaS platform immediately. During the 30-day free managed trial period, the Bipsync Customer Success and Implementation team provided consultation on best-practice workflows, hands-on training and worked closely with the investment teams to configure the system to their specific needs.
With the Bipsync platform in place, the FoF has successfully met its business objectives to:
- Consolidate fragmented systems and remove research silos
- Increase consistency and repeatability in research deliverables and documentation
- Automate idea recommendation workflows and standardized diligence processes
- Configure dashboard views and customized reporting
Here’s a little more detail on how the Bipsync platform delivered those benefits…
Building consistency and speed into research documentation and workflows
Investment professionals at the fund produce and work-on a variety of standardized deliverables each month, such as monthly call notes, manager meeting notes, investor letters, sell-side notes. Prior to implementing Bipsync, analysts created all research content and tracked ideas via a combination of Microsoft Word, Excel, Shared drive and Email. This resulted in content and team silos, introduced inconsistencies and was both labor-intensive and time-consuming to produce and analyze.
With Bipsync’s productivity and powerful process management capabilities, layered on top of a single system-of-record, the fund-of-funds was able to drastically simplify this process with configurable templates, note types and associated repeatable fields, to speed-up manager evaluation and decision-making.
Bipsync quickly configured standardized templates for each of the fund’s specific research content types (monthly call notes etc.) with customized repeatable fields (exposure changes, attribution scoring, positions, themes etc.) and automatic relationship tags, to add the structure the firm needs to simply and quickly capture its required inputs, to produce and review consistent research documentation.
This removed the cognitive burden for analysts to add structure via manual input and formatting requirements. And, when coupled with Bipsync’s robust contact management capabilities and relational database, investment professionals had an easily searchable record of all research, with all associated information now easily retrievable and available across teams in just a few clicks.
Automating processes and establishing a streamlined approach to investment decisions
Bipsync’s Idea Pipeline – again, configured to the funds specific pipeline requirements – further standardized the research process. Previously tracked manually in Excel, Bipsync built custom pipeline qualification stages and accompanying checklists, for analysts to then tag relevant content and entities to these ideas and progress them through diligence stages when evaluating or monitoring a new Manager or specific Fund Vehicle.
The Fund also makes use of Bipsync’s powerful configurable dashboards, where decision makers can view and drill-down on ideas, along with all accompanying research content, context and configurable fields, for easier comparison and review in a single unified view.
With contacts, ideas and research all living side-by side in Bipsync, tagged across multiple dimensions, and with diligence workflows standardized and automated, the FoF now has a more streamlined and consistent process and a powerful reporting mechanism, in one integrated research platform.
If you’d like to find out more about our work with allocators, take a look here or get in touch to talk.
