A service of 
Top Time Wasters for Institutional Investors
Co-written with Institutional Investor, this e-book takes a look at the trend towards bringing investments in-house, as well as the challenges that come along with insourcing. The e-book also examines that technologies that can ease research management, ODD, and portfolio management burdens for overworked and understaffed institutional investment teams.
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:
Instead of flowing freely across an organization, data is restricted within silos. This results in vital facts being buried and important connections being missed.
As an asset allocator, you receive a constant barrage of information from investment reviews, prospective managers, and current funds. Each piece of information — each communication, each document, each transaction — must be collected, reviewed, tagged, and filed for you to appropriately administer your investment portfolio. Unfortunately, this means that your high-value staff is compelled to spend their too-limited time buried in email inboxes, vendor portals, and other communication platforms, rather than devoting themselves further improving decision making.
Now, you can eliminate unsustainable manual tasks, increase your team’s efficiency, achieve higher cost-effectiveness, and optimize your due diligence processes through Backstop IntellX: A full service solution merging human insight with machine intelligence to automate the processing of fund documents and transactions directly into Backstop. Backstop IntellX is a technology-enabled service built specifically for the needs of busy investment and operations professionals.
Download the data sheet to learn more.
EMPOWERING INVESTORS WITH A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO EFFECTIVE, EFFICIENT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT.
The Backstop Research Management Solution combines qualitative, quantitative, and subjective data tracking tools that can enable your firm to streamline, simplify, and succeed in the investment sourcing and evaluation process. Benefits of the Backstop RMS include:
- Access all data from anywhere, at any time, through a cloud-based platform.
- Increase operational efficiencies by centralizing research management.
- Remove barriers between your organization and your information.
- Create consistency and increase transparency.
- Optimize and leverage quantitative and qualitative data with a 360-degree view of their research efforts.
- Protect your data and maintain operational due diligence compliance.
With data and documents all in one place and information presented in context, Backstop Solutions provided Pragma with a turnkey tool that bolstered the investment team’s productivity and allowed them to focus on finding new and better ideas for growth.
Backstop delivered these benefits:
- Easy access to data
- Efficient data management system, allowing more time for new idea generation
- Ability to quickly interface with third parties
- Consistency across the platform for staff and clients
Download the success story to learn more.
As a global investment consultant with over $215 billion in assets under management, a wide range of clients, and a recent acquisition of another major consulting organization, Fiducient Advisors needed a technology platform that was, “flexible, intelligent and forward thinking.”
Brad Long, Fiducient research director and partner, found a solution in Backstop’s Multi-Asset Class RMS that provides his team with fast and easy data access, along with other key benefits that include:
- Consolidation of qualitative and quantitative data
- Every asset class bundled on the same system
- Easy access to information to answer client and in-house queries
- Modular research reports tailored to fit every reader’s needs
Download the client success story to learn more.
To replace its mishmash of systems and processes, Turim MFO needed a centralized system that let every member of its growing team store and track conversations, notes, documents, emails and other information about investments and companies in one platform.
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.
Using Backstop to Manage Four Multi-Billion University Endowments and Investment Pools
CHALLENGE:
DUMAC, the investment management arm of Duke University, is faced with the challenges associated with managing some $19 billion across four endowments and investment pools
SOLUTION:
DUMAC first took advantage of Backstop Solution’s Hedge Fund Liquidity package and then brought on other modules as Backstop became central to the management process.
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.”
Using Backstop to Track and Manage Complex Alternative Strategies
At Backstop, we know ESG is a hot topic because we’ve been approached by both allocators and managers about it. Allocators want to know what other allocators are doing to track ESG. And managers are wondering which ESG metrics allocators are collecting — everything from carbon emissions and energy efficiency to supply chain resilience and business ethics—and how they’re actually gathering it.
Georgia Tech Foundation’s staff members were spending too much time collecting and filing documents related to the 200 funds they manage. Passwords to portals were scattered and no single person was responsible for inputting the information into a shared drive. They needed to streamline their due diligence process. And, as part of a department initiative to become more tech-enabled, they were focused on doing it digitally.
With Backstop IntellX, Georgia Tech Foundation automated due diligence and document collection. The artificial intelligence-enabled solution receives and automatically classifies data directly from managers and provides a one-stop shop for all team members to find the information they need.
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 W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s annual due diligence questionnaire process was a time consuming, cumbersome task, requiring more than 80 hours of time to ensure surveys were returned and converted into PDFs for storage.
PRODUCTIVITY SOLUTIONS FOR PENSION INVESTMENT AND OPERATIONS TEAMS
Backstop Solutions has purpose-built a suite of productivity solutions for both public and corporate plan sponsors. Read our solution brief to understand how defined benefit investors use Backstop Solutions software to achieve greater agility and make the most of their minutes, enabling them to ultimately make better investment decisions and fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to their members.
PRODUCTIVITY SOLUTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONS
As we talk to chief investment officers and their teams, whether in pensions, banks, insurance companies, endowments or foundations, not only is the amount of work increasing, but the amount of data and information they deal with continues to exponentially grow. Portfolios continue to grow larger and more complex in lockstep with the number of available instruments.
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:
Backstop Solutions, an award-winning data and technology provider, delivers the infrastructure and investment platform family office CIOs need to achieve operational excellence and meet long-term objectives. By providing a central repository for all organizational, process, and investment data, Backstop supplies complete transparency and visibility anywhere and anytime, and ensures the continuity of institutional knowledge.
Endowments and foundations face many unique challenges. Successfully managing large-scale multi-asset class portfolios over long horizons is difficult enough. On top of this, many investment offices supporting endowments and foundations need to report to multiple constituents, operate under tight budget constraints, and manage with an understaffed team. To do their jobs well, investment and operations team must aggregate data from multiple sources, representing various lag time and levels of depth. Their monitoring requirements include accurately measuring the risks associated with managers pursuing varied and complex strategies. Learn more about how Backstop can help investment and operations teams for endowments and foundations gain greater focus, visibility, and clarity through productivity-enhancing software solutions.
Learn how leading-edge, cloud-based technology enables bank investment teams to manage research efficiently, collaborate more effectively, and align investment decisions with fiduciary demands
Institutional allocators face an ever-changing and increasingly complex landscape. So, more than two years after we launched the first productivity study for allocators, which dove into their work habits to find out how they’re spending their time, we’re doing it again. Because in order to invest wisely, they must invest their time wisely.
Our goal with this second study was to understand how much time allocators are spending on core tasks versus non-core tasks to identify opportunities for improvement in their day-to-day working lives and to learn if anything had changed or shifted since 2020. We wanted to answer this question: Are they investing their time wisely?
Download the report to find out what insights we gleaned.
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.
Financial markets have seen an assortment of catastrophic crises, with far-reaching negative effects. Much of this impact is preventable with the right technology. However, without it, the damages can be detrimental. This whitepaper looks at what-if scenarios, along with helpful tips for managing risk and minimizing potential losses.
Unlock the full potential of your investment team by prioritizing efficiency. Our whitepaper explores why Chief Investment Officers should embrace automation to free up valuable time wasted on menial tasks. Discover how advanced technology can streamline processes, allowing your investment team to focus on generating successful investment strategies. Don’t let inefficiency hold your team back. Read our whitepaper to gain valuable insights and elevate your investment approach.
When considering working with external vendors, asset allocators must do due diligence to ensure high security standards. However, the security questions frequently asked in RFIs may contain weaknesses. Download Backstop’s whitepaper for guidelines to help improve your firm’s RFI security sections, along with sample questions that you may wish to adapt and use.
Increasing customer expectations and a growing need for business agility and process efficiencies are driving digital transformation across the investment industry. But without a Chief Information Officer, how can a Chief Investment Officer pave the way forward? Backstop’s whitepaper offers nine lessons to help you achieve a smooth digital transformation journey.
Inflexible software, data silos, and process differences across asset classes can slow down an investment team’s efforts. Read Backstop’s whitepaper to learn how the right technology, built to support the complexities of the investment industry, helps your team work at peak efficiency.
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.