The organization
This client is a Canadian alternative investment manager that invests across infrastructure, private equity, and real estate asset classes.
The challenge
The client’s investment tracking, modelling, and monitoring processes were manual, very complex, and time consuming. It owns more than 100 different assets that need to be updated monthly. For example, when an investor asked how rising inflation or interest rate changes might affect them, the company needed to run those scenarios through more than 100 different models.
The client wanted to transition to a cloud-based solution to enhance data integrity, enable stable and periodic monitoring of asset and fund performance, and speed up responses to investor inquiries.
The solution
Our Applied Analytics team created a solution that leveraged front-end tools and technologies end users were comfortable with and modernized the entire back-end infrastructure. We built and developed:
- A standardized template and verification system for source data files and Excel-based models.
- A centralized cloud data hub to store all incoming data from both upstream and downstream processes.
- A standardized data ingestion process into the data hub, grounded in a robust governance framework.
- Automated pipelines in Azure to ingest and transform data from accounting systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, asset and fund level financial models, asset management systems, and Excel workbooks.
The project was delivered on time and on budget.
The outcome & benefits
The results have been exceptional. The client's resource utilization rate has dropped by about 50%, operational insights are now obtained two to three times faster, and decision-making processes have accelerated by 1.5 times.
This enhanced efficiency enables the client to keep pace with its rapid growth trajectory and expanding data requirements. Consequently, we’ve successfully guided the company towards a data-driven approach to decision-making.
