Victoria Langley Private fund managers have handled fund obligations the same way for years. They often rely heavily on compendia, spreadsheets, and outside counsel. While these efforts may be effective in meeting the firm’s obligations, they’re often time-consuming and costly.
Firms now have the opportunity to improve fund obligation management with industry-specific technology. Insight, an AI-powered SaaS solution, gives firms a scalable way to organize and manage their commitments to investors. It’s a dynamic fund obligation management tool with Tasks, Subtasks, SmartLine™, and SmartSearch features. These capabilities help firms centralize their contract data, deliver on their commitments to investors, increase negotiation leverage, and accelerate audit responses.
SmartLine™
Tracking nuanced differences among dozens of side letters across numerous funds is one of the most difficult aspects of obligation management. Insight offers a swift way to view these variations.
The SmartLine™ feature enables users to compare an unlimited number of provisions against a single base provision. The selected obligations can span all funds and be organized in an intuitive workspace within the Insight platform.
Firms can quickly identify, word-for-word, the differences between obligations. This feature can help them actively manage their current fund obligations and bolster the efficiency of future fundraising.
For current obligations, firms can quickly surface any key differences between similar provisions and take the appropriate operational and compliance actions to comply with each variation.
For future fundraises, firms can easily highlight the information necessary to create consistency in the contract language used with all limited partners. Standardizing provision language within the hundreds of Limited Partnership Agreements, side letters, and Most Favored Nation elections throughout a portfolio of funds can simplify operations, make compliance less burdensome, and significantly reduce risk.
Tasks and Subtasks
We created the Tasks feature to more efficiently manage and execute the work associated with each fund obligation. This workflow tool lets users see all the tasks created from each parent obligation. Users can set tasks as either one-time or recurring to distinguish between tasks with event-based triggers and those that happen on a regular basis.
To drill down even further, we added Subtasks. GPs can assign work to stakeholders across the firm, increasing accountability. This allows GPs to build out efficient workflows for their team. They also gain complete visibility into the status of work in progress and can efficiently monitor interim milestones for larger tasks.
Insight’s task management structure improves compliance processes by giving users true control over the obligations in their fund documents and the tasks they must fulfill. With this architecture, Insight provides an intuitive user experience and streamlines fund obligation management processes.
SmartSearch
A common hurdle to implementing contract management technology is the transition. Moving away from traditional organizational and tracking methods is cumbersome, and at times, it’s difficult for firms to gain buy-in from all internal stakeholders.
Ontra’s advanced machine learning models and experienced legal network improve asset managers’ transition to Insight. Firms can take advantage of a global network of specially trained lawyers and the SmartSearch feature to upload fund documentation and quickly add new obligation-related tasks and subtasks.
Whoever handles this transition, SmartSearch provides automated suggestions, ranked by relevance, for organizing fund obligations into SmartGroups of similar commitments. Additionally, because Insight is a human-in-the-loop solution, users’ continuous feedback improves the accuracy of suggestions over time.
This blog was originally published May 21, 2021.