By: Andy Phillips, VP of Data Products, Backstop Solutions Group
As the need for tightened security practices across the SaaS industry rises, many of our clients have seen an uptick of technology providers requiring two-factor authentication, especially vendor portal services. While this is ultimately a best practice and critical for security reasons, it adds major friction to the day-to-day processes of almost every member of an institutional allocator investment team that needs to access documents.
Two-factor authentication means that every single time an institutional investor needs to log into manager portals, they now also need to key in an additional authentication code, which essentially adds 50 percent more time to document processing tasks. Now, multiply that by the dozens of times most allocators are signing into manager portals each week and you’ve got an expensive problem (in relation to how much time is being wasted).
This issue was flagged at Backstop by our clients – who are definitely feeling the strain – and coming to us for a solution. I’m not exaggerating when I say that in every meeting I’ve had with a client since Q4 of 2021, I’ve been asked how Backstop can help reduce the time burden that comes with two-factor authentication. Before then, I would still get that question every once in a while, but now I get it Every. Single. Day.
Well, the good news (and reason for writing this blog post) is that we actually DO have a solution for this: Backstop IntellX completely removes the authentication barrier of manually retrieving documents from portals, saving clients countless hours each week. This critical capability will be even more important going forward as portals step up their cybersecurity game – after all, why would they stop at just two factors? I could see this thing easily going to “multi-factor.”
A Quick Note on How it Works
I’m not here to do a sales pitch, but a quick explanation of Backstop IntellX is in order. When a fund manager posts a document to a portal, it automatically sends an email notification to the Backstop IntellX platform. From there, the platform directly captures the document from the fund source, identifies the type of document it is, applies the correct tags, and then stores the document appropriately in Backstop. This way, every member of the team can access it as needed later.
I’m gratified that we’re helping our clients cut hours that were once devoted to manual tasks. A recent customer success story we published about Georgia Tech Foundation showed that they are saving ~40 hours a month with Backstop IntellX – that’s meaningful for a team that manages $2.5 billion across multiple asset classes and 200 funds.
Megan McDougall, the foundation’s senior investment operations analyst, told us: “Focusing on high-value tasks was the main reason we brought on Backstop and IntellX, and the platform has delivered.”
I invite you to talk to us
We helped George Tech Foundation, and I think we can help you too. If two-factor authentication to get into various manager portals is shaving off valuable time from your day, please reach out to your Backstop representative for a conversation about Backstop IntellX.
