Victoria Langley Insight by Ontra is the leading fund managers’ secret to more efficiently managing investor obligations.
Many private fund managers have handled contract compliance the same way for years. They’ve relied heavily on compendia, spreadsheets, outside counsel, and manual tasks. While these efforts may be effective in meeting firm obligations, they’re costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. Worse yet, they leave managers without a way to quickly search and review provisions to answer internal stakeholders’ and investors’ questions about commitments.
Leading firms are now improving their contract management with purpose-built technology. Insight, an AI-powered SaaS solution, gives firms a scalable way to organize, manage, and meet their commitments to investors.
What is Insight by Ontra?
Insight is a dynamic, digital contract repository with key functionality like SmartLine™, SmartSearch, Task and Subtask features. These capabilities help firms centralize their contract data, deliver on their commitments to investors, quickly answer questions, and accelerate audit responses.
SmartLine™ for better redlining
Tracking nuanced differences among dozens or hundreds of side letters and limited partnership agreements across numerous funds is one of the most difficult and inefficient aspects of contract management for asset managers. Imagine hundreds of rows in a spreadsheet; far too many to keep updated accurately and review quickly.
Without a systematic approach to reviewing and comparing provisions, overseeing contract compliance becomes a challenging and risky situation. Firms could fail to meet commitments to investors, run afoul of regulations, and damage their reputations because of manual processes and ad hoc tools.
SmartLine™, Insight’s redlining feature, enables users to compare an unlimited number of contract provisions against a single base provision and even group similar terms into SmartGroups. Firms can quickly identify, word-for-word, any important differences between similar provisions and take the appropriate operational and compliance actions to meet each variation of the commitment.
SmartSearch for quick answers
The inability to quickly search some or all fund documents is another risky inefficiency in traditional contract management processes. Without in-depth visibility into side letters, LPAs, and other legal documents, asset managers have to rely on a time-consuming review process to answer internal or investors’ questions about commitments. In many cases, asset managers go to outside counsel with their queries, which is slow and costly.
Insight gives asset managers immediate, self-serve access to all their contract data. The SmartSearch feature provides automated suggestions, ranked by relevance, by searching the contract language and summary descriptions. Internal stakeholders can get immediate and reliable answers to questions without going to outside counsel, saving considerable time and money.
Tasks and Subtasks for scalable workflows
Fund managers can create and link Tasks and Subtasks to parent contract obligations, enabling them to build workflows and fulfill their commitments on time and at scale. Stakeholders can assign one-time or recurring tasks to distinguish between those with event-based triggers and those that happen on a regular basis. Managers typically use Subtasks to drill down even further into the individual processes needed before the final sign-off on obligation compliance.
With these obligation workflow tools, firms can assign work to stakeholders across the business, increasing accountability and building efficient, repeatable processes for their teams. 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 contract 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.
Contract data analytics for future negotiations
While Insight gives asset managers the tools to optimize their contract compliance processes, it also offers the ability to review historical terms and prepare for future negotiations. Greater visibility into provisions across documents and funds empowers firms to push for more consistent language in their agreements, which in turn can simplify operations, reduce the administrative burden of contract compliance, and mitigate risk.
This blog was originally published on May 21, 2021.
