Washington University Investment Management Company achieves 90% organic adoption of RMS with Bipsync

The Opportunity

Supporting WUIMC’s mission through a revitalized tech stack

Prior to shifting to a generalist model, WUIMC operated within a siloed structure. Each asset class (such as private capital or absolute return) had its own team assigned to it. The team included directors, associates, and analysts. This hierarchy created information and knowledge silos.

Under the generalist model, there are no longer asset class-specific teams. Instead, WUIMC has worked to make the investment structure uniform in nature. “The idea there is that good investments are good investments, whether they’re in this asset class or that asset class. We want to apply the same basic concepts to everything and facilitate communication amongst our employees. An idea for private equity may also apply to hedge funds, so it’s important to break down walls,” explains David.

This switch served as the catalyst for WUIMC to revitalize its tech stack and find a new focused solution for their investment team. At the time, the organization used a monolithic CRM platform, which also doubled as a research repository. WUIMC’s custodial bank kept the official books-andrecords, which were reconciled with a shadow book that was managed internally. As David puts it, “The advantage was that it covered all the bases and was easy to maintain. The disadvantage was that everyone was equally dissatisfied. It was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

The monolithic CRM platform had research management, but it was little more than a rich-text entry box. It was a major point of friction, especially considering WUIMC’s increased focus on deep due diligence. The investment team used consumer apps (e.g. Evernote) to take notes and would only paste them into the text box days later. While the solution was functional, it lacked robust compliance, collaboration, and mobile-friendly features.

While research was a core business practice for the investment team, the existing solution treated it as an afterthought. WUIMC wanted to become one of the best asset allocators in their peer group, so they shifted their focus to finding a best-of-breed solution.

As part of their search for a solution to better fit their vision and needs, WUIMC talked to peers, reviewed generalized consulting materials, and studied research management system (RMS) options online. This information was eventually compiled into a list of potential options. The team compared these options across categories in an internal model to determine which one was the best fit. Bipsync entered the list due to a peer recommendation and was selected based on its ease of use and feature list.

The Solution

A best-of-breed RMS platform

One of the top priority features for WUIMC’s new RMS system was a consumer-grade interface. The team wanted a solution that could match the intuitiveness of apps like Evernote, with offline capabilities and a native iOS app. “Having an app that was really optimized for the end user experience (UX) was essential for our plan,” notes David. “When you’re talking about best-of-breed, if you’re not giving each group of users the best UX you can, then what’s the point?”

Native pipeline management was another essential feature as well as a robust object and metadata model. The team wanted to ensure that funds, managers, asset classes, and other objects were represented in a robust, logical, and flexible fashion. That way, they could avoid the headache of trying to integrate structured and unstructured data. Bipsync’s REST API was also attractive to WUIMC, “one of the best I’ve ever seen,” praises David.

The Result

A customized research management experience that users love

Prior to implementation, WUIMC performed a proof-of-concept (POC) with key stakeholders during the testing phase. To achieve adoption across the organization, the team made decisions around object models, required tags, and naming conventions for notes. These best practices were compiled and shared with end-users for guidance. They also worked with Bipsync to import and clean the XML export from the previous monolithic system. This methodical roll-out served WUIMC well with an 80 to 90% organic adoption rate amongst the investment team.

Bipsync soon became WUIMC’s preferred platform for conducting research. As the team’s appetite for usage grew, they recognized areas where they could collaborate on new innovative features. The team wanted to display fund performance within the RMS to give them more context when preparing to speak to managers. This request required performance data to be integrated into Bipsync.

To begin, David and his team started by loading this data through the back-end and the REST API integration with Bipsync. “At first, it was just a few fields here and there, such as fiscal-year-to-date actual returns, NAVs, and unfunded commitments. Then it gradually expanded because we wanted to provide more information at users’ fingertips while they’re traveling.”

David says the solution to this request came to him as an “aha moment.” He began to look for ways to extend Bipsync’s interface to show performance more effectively, especially on mobile. They decided to create a custom HTML table to be loaded as a HTML field, which would then be shown on both the web and iOS app. This solution could display returns for managers and funds across all platforms in a compact form.

Over time, David moved to viewing Bipsync as the central workspace for the investment management team. He worked with Bipsync to weave interfaces of other apps into Bipsync so that the investment management team could spend 90% of their time in one system. Doing so displayed information in a format that users were comfortable and familiar with. The Bipsync development team took this from idea to execution in a matter of weeks. “This major UI framework went from impossible to reality in under a month. It was magical,” notes David. Bipsync branded this new ability, to add any number of custom context areas and external data displays to the Bipsync interface, the “App-Engine.”

It helped to reduce fragmentation, something that David sees as beneficial for both asset owners and asset managers. “My understanding is that system fragmentation is even worse for asset managers. I would say that it would probably be even more powerful for them,” he shares.

David describes the support provided by Bipsync as “excellent” and “unheard of.” Bipsync was able to resolve a Windows app issue for the institution in just 45 minutes. The development of custom pages came at the perfect timing for WUIMC as well. David explains, “That willingness to really think about new things and have that client and use-case focused approach is the right way to go.”

In the future, David sees investment management research continuing to embrace a mobile-first focus, native integrations, and innovations such as the Bipsync App-Engine.

“I don’t want to manage infrastructure. I want to work directly on things that deliver value. Bipsync really allows us to deliver that value very quickly. The everyday effectiveness of it is really what sells the product.”

– David Li, CTO