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Debunking Myths: There is no such thing as a best practice In institutional and alternative Investment operations

Have you heard from software vendors that there is a particular best practice for an investment process and that’s why you are having to force-fit your processes into their technology? After working with more than 800 clients in the institutional and alternative investment industry for the past 15 years, we’ve found that there is no such thing as a single best practice for any business process. That’s why it’s imperative to choose configurable software that will conform to your business processes, not the other way around. Download this white paper to learn more about:

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DOWNLOAD OUR WHITE PAPER TO LEARN:

  • What savvy asset owners look for when evaluating managers (it’s more than outsized returns)
  • Reasons why managers may not get funded or may receive full redemption notice (other than performance)
  • Why performance isn’t everything to an allocator

DOWNLOAD OUR WHITE PAPER TO LEARN:

  • The changes taking place in the PE industry today
  • What your investors are looking for in communications about their investments
  • How to respond to these increasing market pressures with agility

DOWNLOAD OUR WHITE PAPER TO LEARN:

  • Why agility and operational excellence are important?
  • What does operational excellence look like in an alternative investment firm?
  • Why operational excellence is so difficult to achieve in alternative investment firms?
  • How to get closer to operational excellence
  • 3 steps towards operational excellence that every investment firm can begin taking today

OPTIMIZE INVESTOR TRUST AND LOYALTY WITH HONEST, INFORMATIVE, AND CONSISTENT ACCOUNT SERVICING.

Developing and nurturing lasting client relationships requires the right balance of intuition and information. Sure, your instinct is a great start. But information is what truly powers success. To get that balance right, you need a robust service and communication program that organizes and streamlines knowledge, so you can efficiently manage relationships and drive your organization’s overall success.

Backstop CRM – Client Relationship Management software – is an award-winning, centralized database that empowers you to continually and effectively meet goals and exceed expectations.

The Backstop CRM is purpose-built for the needs of:

  • Hedge Funds
  • Private Equity/Real Estate/Venture Capital
  • Funds of Funds
  • Advisors and Investment Consultants
  • Pensions
  • Endowments & Foundations
  • Family Offices

Download the data sheet to learn more.

Win rates. Pipeline status. Product demand. Real-time data about all of these matters and more is essential if your business development team is to consistently identify, nurture, and close the best opportunities. Download the white paper “ The 10 Questions Every Head of BD Needs Answers to Pronto” to hone in on the critical information you need to deliver on your capital-raising mandate.

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Backstop Integrator empowers you to connect your diverse systems and applications with the Backstop platform, breaking down silos so data can flow freely within your organization.

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Compliance in the institutional investment space can no longer be treated as a local issue. New regulations mean that firms have to take a global approach to their regulatory compliance.

Optima Partners has established itself as a market leader in the industry by providing comprehensive, cutting-edge regulatory compliance support both domestically and globally. Backstop Solutions Group plays a key role in enabling Optima to deliver ever more responsive, proactive, and tailored compliance solutions on a global scale.

Joshua Mika is a Chicago-based Partner and Head of the Midwest Region, at Optima and a regulatory compliance veteran with twenty years of experience in the financial services industry. He shines the spotlight on three main areas where Optima’s partnership with Backstop generates dramatic value: configurability, auditing, and tracking.

Read the success story to learn more!

REAL ASSETS INVESTING, REAL PRODUCTIVITY GAINS

CHALLENGE:

Help rapidly growing real assets investment firm professionalize and automate data collection and distribution.

SOLUTION:

Backstop was initially brought in to satisfy GTIS’ data management; the company’s use of the system has expanded greatly over the years including extensive use of Portal, Backstop’s web-based reporting platform.

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Horsley Bridge is based in San Francisco, California, and has satellite offices located around the world. Through Backstop’s suite of CRM solutions, Horsley Bridge is now well equipped to deliver even greater value to their clients and optimize their operational efficiencies. Mr. Roller concluded, “We’ve always been on the leading edge in terms of investing in systems to get the best possible output. Backstop will help us to achieve our goals as an investment firm, both through their technology solutions and as a trusted partner.”

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Ironwood Capital Management, an alternative investment manager focused on constructing multi-manager hedge fund portfolios, was relying on multiple Excel spreadsheets to track capital in/out flows. The spreadsheets required error prone manual data entry, and it was almost impossible to track trends at a firm-wide level. Ironwood needed to bolster its capital in/out flow processes with a digital approach that allowed for real-time updates and the ability to better monitor activity across its products and the firm.

Ironwood turned to Backstop to centralize its data and build a responsive and relational database for improved capital in/out reporting.

Download the client success story to learn more.

The Backstop Productivity Suite provides the flexibility necessary to support multiple investment methodologies, while leveraging multiple structured data points to drive optimized business decisions for private equity and venture capital. These solutions include:

  • Deal flow management
  • Investor relations
  • Capital-raising
  • Client relationship management
  • Portfolio management
  • Asset monitoring
  • Client portal

BACKSTOP’S PRODUCTIVITY SOLUTIONS FOR HEDGE FUNDS

Today’s alternative investment industry faces numerous challenges pressuring Hedge Funds to differentiate themselves and prove their value in a highly competitive landscape.

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Backstop’s leading-edge, cloud-based software delivers operational efficiency for funds of funds coupled with the agility needed to meet competitive market demands. Benefits include:

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At Backstop, we know that a successful partnership starts out with a successful implementation. Therefore, our goal is to decrease time to value and increase your ROI with a swift, tailored implementation and migration process.

Our Professional Services Group will walk with you every step of the way through implementation and migration. Our experienced team draws upon the best practices of over a thousand client implementations and the expertise cultivated from 13,500 hours of implementation every year — and puts it all to work for you. In so doing, we ensure that you receive the maximum value from your investment in our platform and accomplish your goals and objectives in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

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The average alternative investment manager, according to our new survey of investor relations and business development professionals, works 52 hours each week. To anybody in this high-pressure, ever changing industry, those long hours are likely no surprise. But, as investor relations and business development professionals push beyond the limits of traditional 9-to-5 workdays, they may also want to ensure that they’re spending their hours on the right things.

And that’s what our survey of more than 100 BD and IR professionals set out to answer: Do BD/IR professionals believe they are using their hours productively on the tasks they deem to be the most valuable, or are they squandering an inordinate amount of time on less strategic work?

Our goal with this survey was to understand how much time BD/IR professionals are spending on core business development and investor relations tasks versus other non-core tasks to identify opportunities for improvement in their day-to-day working lives. In other words, are they making time work for them or against them, and is there room for improvement?

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Investment firms should be able to tout repeatable, predictable, and sustainable processes that generate superior performance. To increase capital and improve investor retention, firms must follow four basic steps. Read Backstop’s whitepaper to learn the nature of these steps and how your firm can accomplish them.

Growing financial services firms eventually reach a point where new software is necessary to keep up with a competitive marketplace and client demands. The merits of buying or building software must be weighed against operational and economic considerations. Backstop’s whitepaper offers four key questions to help your firm make the right decision.

An increased information flow and shift to digitalization have made it crucial to switch from static documentation to systematic data management. Why is this necessary and how can it benefit you? Read Backstop’s whitepaper to learn how to enhance your fiduciary responsibility.