Investment management is ultimately about relationships. Asset owners and asset managers build trust with each other over time by telling the truth, honoring their commitments, and communicating frequently. In other words, by developing a relationship. Whether you’re an asset owner or asset manager, the enterprise software systems you use to keep track of your relationships must keep an accurate record of the past.
You can’t implement a generic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system geared for selling widgets to the masses and expect to be able to track – for example – the career history of a particular prospect, investor, or manager as they move from firm to firm or fund to fund. The usual answer in a generic CRM is to create a duplicate entry, and we all know how much “fun” that creates down the line.
Having accurate information about the interaction history with a particular prospect or investor properly categorized by firm/fund is important to asset owners and asset managers alike. Asset owners are frequently diligencing fund managers, and need to know things like:
- Where they’ve worked before
- Whom they’ve worked with
- How long they’ve stayed with a fund
Not only that, some management firms literally have hundreds of funds, and parsing out the relationships between managers and the funds they’ve managed can be crucial to the accuracy and robustness of the research management and ODD processes.
Similarly, asset managers who regularly meet with prospective investors to raise capital or regularly report to and service their investors need to be able to follow the trajectory of these investors to report accurately, build better relationships, and optimize time.
Whether we’re talking about asset owners or asset managers, this is a relationship business. There’s much to learn from the past. The ability to capture dated relationships helps increase firm-wide intelligence, a valuable asset. That’s why we’ve made it possible to:
- Track start and stop dates on relationships in Backstop
- Search on organizations that are related to hundreds of other entities or funds
If you would like to know more about Backstop’s new “Dated Relationships” functionality, please contact your Relationship Manager or Backstop Support at (312) 277-7702 or support@backstopsolutions.com.
