A Q&A with Mike Haluszczak, product manager, on why clients like Asia Alternatives are adopting Exchangelodge to wrangle their portfolio company data and improve overall portfolio monitoring efficiency and accuracy.
As investments into alternatives continue to increase, so does the data associated with these investments. More data should mean more understanding of our portfolios and more confidence in our investment decisions, but for many alternative investors and investment managers, this is not the case.
Even with an influx of new technologies and tooling for monitoring portfolio company data, GPs and LPs are still facing fundamental data health issues. If you can’t trust your portfolio data, then you cannot effectively monitor your portfolio.
Enhancing trust and building confidence in clients’ portfolio company data is top of mind for Exchangelodge product manager Mike Haluszczak. We talked with Mike about his experience helping Exchangelodge clients like Asia Alternatives Management LLC, a solution platform dedicated to helping institutional investors make investments in private equity across Asia, solve challenges in effectively managing unstructured and unruly portfolio company data for monitoring, analysis, and reporting.
1. What are some challenges clients typically experience when working with portfolio company data?
When dealing with private markets port co data, we commonly see four key challenges pop up again and again:
- Portfolio data is being manually entered into the needed systems. This normally becomes a very time-consuming process with an ongoing risk of human error in executing on the data entry tasks.
- All the important portfolio attributes are not captured. In some cases, this information isn’t provided and in other cases the data is simply too much to key in manually.
- Processes for managing data are unstructured. Without clear and repeatable data workflows documented and implemented, investors lose control over their data review and approval processes.
- Connections between quantitative and qualitative data are missing or nonexistent. Many clients wish to append internal commentary on their investments to the actual reports received, but do not have the technology to support this work.
All these challenges combined lead to inefficiencies, which, in turn, impair monitoring effectiveness and insights.
2. Why did Asia Alternatives choose Exchangelodge to solve its portfolio company data challenges?
Clients like Asia Alternatives are forward-thinking innovators. In addition to implementing investment strategies that lead to outperformance, Asia Alternatives is also implementing up-and-coming private markets technologies such as Exchangelodge to help drive similar results. When determining what approach Asia Alternatives would take to solve the challenges mentioned above, the firm did not want to be locked into one vendor and aimed to leverage open APIs to execute on its data management tasks. Additionally, the decision was made to work with startups or smaller, more nimble companies instead of larger, traditionally slower-paced vendors or build the technology in house. To that point, Asia Alternatives stated that it made sense to hire Exchangelodge, a technology company, to solve a technology problem. It simply wasn’t in their wheelhouse. Through the engagement with Exchangelodge and its other vendor partners, Asia Alternatives’ goal is to participate in guiding product development, and grow and scale together.
3. In your experience, when do clients know it’s time to implement private markets technology?
According to Asia Alternatives, two things need to be at play. First, there must be pain involved in the way you are currently managing your private markets data. Second, there must be a desire to be a leader and innovate by trying something novel in a very complex space. Private markets technology is still in its infancy and it’s improving every day. For many firms, the two factors mentioned plus the ability to spend money to alleviate the pain often determines when it’s time to implement private markets technology like Exchangelodge.
4. What results will Asia Alternatives experience after implementing Exchangelodge?
Asia Alternatives wants to leverage Exchangelodge to ensure data quality before sending that data downstream to portfolio monitoring systems like iLEVEL. First, the firm is focused on moving from manual data entry to simply checking the data that has been automated, cleansed, and validated through Exchangelodge’s Port Co Data Exchange technology.
Currently, Asia Alternatives’ fund accounting team checks portfolio company data in three locations, spending a considerable amount of time on this each quarter.
After implementing Exchangelodge, Asia Alternatives is expecting to reduce the time spent managing data by at least a third every quarter. More efficiencies are expected as additional automated workflows are created for the fund accounting team over time.
Asia Alternatives has referred to us as a “private markets data traffic cop” ensuring that the data coming in from GPs and the data going out to other systems can be trusted. The right data is going to the right place at the right time with quality checks and validation done so that they have a high degree of confidence in the reports and dashboards created downstream. This is what we are on a mission to deliver to other private markets leaders like Asia Alternatives.
Explore Exchangelodge’s Port Co Data Exchange Solution
- We know portfolio company data capture can be more efficient.
- We believe that portfolio company data can be validated, accurate and trustworthy.
- We restore our clients’ confidence in their portfolio company data for monitoring, analysis, or reporting.
How Exchangelodge Port Co Data Exchange Works
No matter your data source or sources, we enable transparency and control over your data so it can be used more effectively and confidently for portfolio monitoring activities.
