For allocators looking to standardize and accelerate their proprietary approach to manager selection, oversight and monitoring, an open-architected, integrated, research platform is moving-up the agenda.
In the last 12 months alone, we’ve welcomed three of the world’s Top 15 University Endowments into the Bipsync client base, alongside a number of Foundations, Pension Funds, Family Offices and other allocator institutions.
Why? Well, we like to think there are many reasons (and it’ll take more than one blog post to cover them all), but it’s fair to say that Bipsync’s highly-configurable, research process-driven and modern platform is a fresh approach compared to many of the cumbersome, legacy, all-in-one CRM/PMS systems of the last 5-10 years.
But we also know it’s more important what our clients think. So, we’ve set aside the research management must-haves such as always-accessible mobile access, a great user-experience and robust SaaS infrastructure and security measures for now, and below detailed three features that our endowment and allocator clients tell us makes us stand out:
- Connecting Relationships – Contacts and Context across Multiple Dimensions.
The ability to capture key information related to different relationships, contacts and points of connectivity across your universe: GP Fund Managers, funds, strategies, other LPs, and individuals quickly and easily.
Bipsync’s organizational structure allows our users to easily tag/associate research assets across multiple entity types (and their relationship to one another) by structured data properties, denoting firm type (i.e. fund manager/parent company/fund vehicle) and strategy (i.e. equity/fixed income), for example, and associate each of these with any number of other customized classifications for your fund.
This allows users to immediately determine which contacts work on various fund vehicles, which fund managers oversee those vehicles, and which other LPs are invested in those funds too.
In fact, you can see an example of how we enable this, in our Aggregate Fields feature – announced in release 151 last week – http://bipsync.com/blog/aggregate-fields-clone-pipeline-151/
Bipsync specifically developed this feature for allocator clients to more readily roll-up – or aggregate – information captured at the underlying Fund level to their related Fund Manager dashboards. A lot of these allocator clients view their investment universe at the manager level, so seeing the relevant information from all underlying funds in one place is very useful.
- Fund Pipelines – Increased Consistency, Automation and Standardization
Just as you demand a clear investment discipline in the managers you recommend, it’s vital you maintain that discipline and standard in your own manager research and evaluation process.
Our fund pipelines enable your team to define and customize qualification stages, for your unique investment processes. These could be “Researching”, “Qualifying”, “Monitoring”, “Approved” and “Declined”, for example. From your in-depth research, to screening, through to Benchmarking and Scorecards, capturing diligence across PM Interviews and Recommendations, right through to Continued Monitoring of Allocations, it’s your pipeline configured your way.
Whether you’rE evaluating a new Fund Manager, a specific Fund Vehicle, or otherwise, simply create contexts within the pipeline, and then tag and associate relevant content and contexts to associate them. Use configurable fields to compare and add remarks such as feasibility, review data sources for comparison, etc. in a single unified view – and from there move funds from one stage to another based on your specific criteria, scorecards and process checks, some of which can be automated via Bipsync’s Rules Engine (or completed manually).
- Configuration – Standardize your Process, your Way
The need to entrench a rigorous, repeatable approach in your research operations that’s built on best practice, but not uniformity with everyone else’s, is about balancing flexibility with formality, which empowers analyst productivity and enabling structure.
Pipeline stages, diligence checks and progression rules are all configurable to your funds specific processes. You can define stages, and standardize scoring systems, rules and deliverables across each, build dashboards, grids and reports, to add consistency and repeatability to the way you monitor and measure your research from top-level universe monitoring all the way through to investment decision.
One CTO at a Bipsync allocator client said:
“Bipsync’s strength lies in its flexibility: with their extensive configuration support, from our organization system through to process management, it can be adapted to suit – and accelerate – any workflow.”
Of course, there’s plenty more to Bipsync for Allocators, and many more use-cases across strategies and size and scale.
There’s a lot to be said for how Bipsync’s endowment clients, in particular, are using our open API to build out their integrated investment technology stack, so much so that that is for a separate blog.
In the meantime, you can find more information on Bipsync for allocators here, or in this quick Fund of Funds case study. And of course, to hear more about our clients and specific use-cases – please get in touch or schedule a free demo to see the Bipsync platform in action for yourself.
