Direct lender seeks technology roadmap to automate pipeline management, portfolio monitoring, and loan administration
Client Profile
A socially responsible impact investment firm providing both private debt and equity capital to small businesses in emerging markets across the globe. The client currently has $500 million Assets Under Management (AUM) across five private fund offerings.
Business Situation
The client projected significant growth in AUM over the next three years. Their current operational and reporting processes are not designed to scale due to lack of automation. Senior management expressed concern around their ability to keep up with the projected asset growth without incrementally adding staff to support it. The client has a minimal internal I.T. team and a significant bias toward outsourcing technology needs. Due to lack of in-house technical expertise, the client sought a technology advisor to help them navigate the evaluation and selection of prospective vendors which would eventually lead to an overhaul of their entire technology stack that supports investor and deal pipeline management, portfolio company monitoring, asset servicing, and fund administration.
Grandview’s Role
The client engaged Grandview based on our proven expertise in their underlying asset classes and fund structures. The client has utilized Grandview as a trusted advisor during multiple project phases that included a current state assessment, target operating model, multiple vendor selections, and an overall technology roadmap. Grandview began the engagement by interviewing various team leaders to identify pain points, understand future state requirements, and inventory criteria needed to evaluate vendors. Based on the requirements, Grandview engaged with several vendors to obtain system demonstrations, discuss use cases, and ultimately recommend solutions that provide a foundation for our client to scale their business.
Business Results
Designed an end to end target operating model that clearly defined roles and responsibilities and hand-off points between two operating systems, five business functions, and two external service providers.
Minimized incremental costs by leveraging and reconfiguring the current state system of record for investor and deal pipeline management.
Saved $50,000 by developing an interim data management application that supported the decommission of a legacy system supporting portfolio company monitoring, credit risk, and loan covenant tracking.
Recommended and implemented a new portfolio monitoring system that automated data collection and reporting and allowed the client to decommission 100+ manual spreadsheets.
Migrated over 1 million historical data elements and verified for accuracy. Provided data quality metrics and root cause analysis that were explained by bad data, methodology differences, and configuration errors.
Built consensus to outsource the loan administration function to a 3rd party which allowed the client to re-allocate three full-time employees to revenue generating activities.
