By: Paymun Saket
Managing Director - LP Products
June 1, 2022
The technology field for LPs has exploded with options over the last decade, rushing to keep pace with LP’s embrace of the private markets. In a highly manual and opaque sector of the institutional investing world, these technology strides have offered LPs a new way to capture, view, and interact with their private portfolio data, automating much of the process and completely overhauling the way they make investment decisions.
But even with these expanded capabilities on the market, some LPs hold off on tapping into them, for a variety of reasons. Some are content to continue tracking and managing their assets via Excel spreadsheets, others may not have the budget to adopt an enterprise tool. But others, otherwise ready and willing to optimize their investment operations with the help of technology, choose to stop short because they are daunted by or skeptical of the process of migrating all portfolio data to a new platform.
We at Allvue understand that adopting new software brings risks for your team, and that data migration as an unknown could appear to be a risk. That’s why we want to give you a look under the hood at the data migration process once you sign on with Allvue’s Limited Partner Portfolio Management solution.
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Populating data templates to begin the normalization process
Data template creation is the first step in helping Allvue’s professional service team understand the structure of your data. By loading your portfolio data, we are able to access a first draft of your dataset and begin understanding the relationship between all of your holdings.
As we all know, private market data is complex and certain definitions or common reports are not always standardized from investor to investor. The following steps are meant to bring edits to these templates so that they may be finalized and loaded into the platform in their ideal form, across all categories, including the below:
- Fund managers
- Investee companies
- Investee funds
- Investing entities
- Managed funds
- Ownership linkages
- Positions
- Transactions
- Valuations
Mapping data relationships
After data template drafts are created, Allvue’s services team leverages their expertise to dig into the details of your business as they develop a complete understanding of how your asset terminology and data structure relates to Allvue’s terminology and data structure. When it comes to particularly complex or custom investment arrangements, such as co-investments or side pockets, we work closely with your team to map out the structure and relationships accurately to ensure it hits the system correctly and will be ready for your analysis and reporting. After all relationships are mapped out and finalized, the data is ready for loading into the system.
Importing data by category into the system
Once the data has been approved in its final templates and then mapped out, your Allvue service team will load all data into the system, based on the individual import rules of each data category:
- Positions data
- Transactions data
- Valuation data
- Ownership linkage data
- Fund manager/company investment/fund investment data
- Managed fund data
Capturing data moving forward
But what about after implementation? As an LP, you are of course receiving new data all the time from your many GPs, and much of it lives across countless static PDFs delivered via email – from capital call documents to distribution statements to quarterly reporting documents. How does Allvue make sure all that crucial, disparate data gets pulled into the system and filtered into your portfolio view?
The solution to this concern is built directly into the platform: our document processing system, or DPS. Our DPS uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to review static documents, analyze them, and automatically extract the needed data to store within the Allvue platform.
Want to see DPS in action? Check out a two-minute demo here.
The technology reads the PDFs from your GPs without requiring you to change the format to fit a certain template. Allvue automatically identifies what kind of document you’ve received and extracts the relevant information from it, removing the need for any manual inputs. Based on the data the system ingests, the correct workflow is then initiated. So, for example, a capital call document would automatically create a draft transaction for your review.
Every processed document is then automatically aggregated and organized in the document management hub. Within the document management hub, you can review all the documents and filter based on criteria, such as by a certain fund or over a certain time period. After navigating to a specific document, you can view the automated workflow and view any relevant attachments.
The module also allows you to set reminders for upcoming documents to be delivered by GPs, prompting you to follow up about any that may be late or missing.
Learn more about LP Portfolio Management and Allvue’s data migration process
Being able to rely on data is a challenging but essential element of managing a portfolio of private assets in today’s private market environment. Allvue’s LP Portfolio Management solution empowers LPs to maintain a single source of truth as they track, manage and report on their portfolios. The solution’s power is reliant on the airtight data migration processes our teams have developed, as well as its solid strategies for capturing and organizing new data on an ongoing basis.
To learn more about how LP Portfolio Management can optimize your private investment operations and how your data is migrated to the platform upon adoption, reach out for a demo today.
