How EBG sees Portfolio Management with Fundwave as a Single Source of Truth
"Fundwave's a good product. It achieves what we set out to demonstrate - to have a stable database environment to store our information and report from."
Hugh Parry
Compliance and Risk Management
About EBG Investment Solutions
EBG Investment Solutions is a boutique investment advisor and asset manager specializing in sustainable alternative investments and private asset markets. The firm serves institutional clients such as pension funds, insurance companies, and family offices.
About Hugh
Hugh leads a small unit at EBG, responsible for compliance, risk and financial management processes, including fund control and investor reporting activities. Operating in a regulated environment and with clients requiring accurate reporting and data integrity, maintaining high operational standards is a top priority.
Outgrowing Spreadsheets
"Reliance on spreadsheets exposes us to multiple operational issues - data security, lack of version control, concentration of knowledge."
EBG has relied on spreadsheets for years. What started as simple spreadsheet-based workflow became increasingly complicated as requirements grew, with structures and logic becoming stretched. The classic limitations of spreadsheets started to appear - sensitive data in fragmented files with limited access controls, audit trails, and versioning; knowledge of critical processes and spreadsheets concentrated with few individuals.
EBG wanted to move away from spreadsheets as early as possible, so that data reliability and operational resilience could be maintained as EBG scales. As Hugh explained, "We need to have a system that allows us to build and share operational knowledge with multiple users securely".
Evaluating Fundwave: A Proof of Concept
"The PoC was a good exercise to map our requirements to core Fundwave functionality, and to clarify initial implementation scope."
EBG partnered with Fundwave for a one-month PoC to see if the platform could meet their needs, with the goal of mapping operational workflows to Fundwave's core functionality. Two highlights of the evaluation: the platform's structure, and the people behind it.
The Platform
Fundwave's dashboards proved themselves once the team got familiar with the platform. Hugh says "Fundwave's approach to tracking metrics for underlying fund investments opened up opportunities to do things that weren't possible with spreadsheets."
The Team
The Fundwave team's support extended well beyond basic onboarding. As Hugh reflects, "The team was very responsive in helping navigate Fundwave. They assisted in mapping EBG's complex transaction datasets, showing how Fundwave could transform them for visualization via its dashboards and reports."
Implementation & Insights
"Fundwave's a good product. It achieves what we set out to demonstrate - to have a stable database environment on which to store our information and report from."
Beyond achieving this core goal, the project has delivered other benefits. "It has been a good learning experience," Hugh notes "It has been particularly helpful to see the various features and functions available, and how Fundwave approaches their data structures."
For teams considering a transition, EBG has a key piece of advice: invest early in the design and set-up of your data model. "Benefit from the help of the Fundwave team to get the data model right - particularly the choices for representing umbrella fund, target funds and underlying investment assets, with their respective flows and metrics", Hugh recommends.
What's Next
EBG concludes they've found a platform that can accommodate both their existing fund-of-funds structures as well as future needs as the business evolves.
"We are excited to have identified a platform offering a single source of truth that can be accessed by our entire team securely."
Going forward, we see that Fundwave can make a big difference in how we record and use information, with team members able to interact directly with a system instead of needing to coordinate with the primary owner of a spreadsheet.
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