The end of 2021 is (unbelievably) sneaking up on us, so it’s the time of year when firms of all shapes and sizes start reviewing budgets, evaluating business relationships, and planning initiatives for the coming year.
It is a very interesting time, from a business planning and evaluation standpoint.
At APX Stream, our corporate mantra is: when clients benefit, we benefit. It’s what guides everything we do – there is nothing self-serving in our approach to data management and distribution, nor in what we offer to our clients.
Everything is designed to add significant value at a scalable price point for which the vast majority of asset managers can budget.
That’s why we rarely write pieces about our products and services, specifically; instead, we prefer to focus our attention on advice, thought leadership, and industry awareness.
However, over the past year, the APX Vault has undergone significant development, and we feel it is important to describe to you this growing functionality, as well as the myriad of ways APX Stream can help asset managers to better assemble, manage, reconcile, and market their investment data in order to grow and retain AUM.
THE Data Hub
We strive to make the APX Vault the hub around which an investment manager can build out their data marketing (and larger marketing) effort. The spokes extending from this hub include:
- he public and private industry databases
- Industry data portals
- Marketing collateral (fact sheets. pitch books, etc.)
- Retention / quarterly client DDQs
- Investor portals
- Institutional accounts
We know that assembling, managing and distributing data can be challenging and difficult to keep on track, which is why we built our Vault in the first place. Every manager we’ve ever come across has preferred to work with a solutions provider that can do three things:
- Offer a turnkey tool solution,
- Make it a one-stop shop, and
- Reduce the amount of work for their team.
The Vault is designed to LIFT from the manager the burden of investment data assembly, management, and distribution. So, what’s new in how we achieve that lift?
Narratives Workbook
Of the few automated investment data solutions on the market today, most can easily handle the quantitative data. Handling the narrative, open-ended questions? That’s another issue entirely, and the Vault has a truly elegant solution: the automated Narrative Workbook.
The narrative systems store all of a firm’s qualitative questions for easy review and publication across the RFPs, databases, marketing collateral, and DDQs.
An important tool in the Vault’s narrative workbook is what we call “Draft Mode,” which enables every department in a firm to contribute to the narratives which describe who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why.
And because APX Stream has an “unlimited user account policy,” true across-the-board collaboration is made possible, from portfolio management to sales, marketing, compliance, and administration.
And it all publishes to the databases with a simple click, with each narrative section easily exportable for external collaboration and record keeping (for compliance).
Consultant View
The Consultant View feature enables our managers to see what their AUM and Portfolio Characteristics datasets look like on specific databases, laid out exactly how the database subscribers see them.
Understanding what their target prospects see is important, in terms of specific positioning and strategy. Seeing what a consultant sees enhances data marketing strategy and branding.
Perhaps most importantly, the Consultant View allows a firm’s compliance team to easily, accurately, and quickly see what the world sees, now that the regulators are paying closer attention to investment data that is being leveraged for marketing purposes, and across multiple distribution endpoints.
Data Showroom
Many managers with whom we work have institutional accounts or consultant relationships that require consistent disclosure. One way we facilitate a client’s faithful execution of these responsibilities is to offer their client’s “Read-only” access to those areas of their Vault that are specific to that unique institutional account’s portfolio data. Doing so allows institutions and consultants the ability to keep tabs on performance and other datasets (such as holdings, portfolio characteristics and personnel gains/losses) to ensure faithful adherence to the investment policy statement.
Quarterly / Retention DDQ Automation
Like the Data Showroom, the Vault’s retention DDQ automation is designed to simplify and streamline reporting requirements to consultants and institutional accounts. The greatest virtue of this automated tool is that because it lifts much of the burden of client retention activities, more time and effort can be devoted to new business acquisition.
When we speak of the Vault enabling AUM retention and growth, it’s features like DDQ automation to which we are referring. Because the number of DDQs being sent to managers for the purposes of client service and asset retention is growing every quarter, automating these important documents is necessary, if for no other reason than simply to keep up with your team’s workload, and reserve their best efforts for the new business RFPs.
Fact Sheet & Marketing Collateral Automation
APX Stream has a robust and highly effective marketing collateral development and automation business. For larger clients who outsource their fact sheet and marketing collateral to one of the industry’s leaders, APX Stream now works with several of these large marketing collateral automation firms, providing us with the ability to publish data from the Vault directly to these external systems, for a seamless data marketing experience.
The benefit here is, “publish your data to one place and have it sent everywhere your marketing strategy requires.” We are more than happy to discuss our relationships in this area on an individual basis.
Database Research
We have developed in-depth research into more than 50 databases across the globe. This proprietary research is central to the database strategy consulting we perform for our clients every month to ensure scarce marketing resources are being deployed thoughtfully.
APX Stream’s comprehensive, research-based database consulting is unique to our business. We can answer the single most important question clients ask: where should we publish our data, and why?
Our research enables us to explain to clients the databases to which their target markets subscribe (and those to which they don’t), and how they should position that data in order to prompt an unsolicited inquiry.
In the end…
It’s important to note that these are just the few improvements we’ve made to the Vault over the past 6 months. The software is under constant development, often at the behest of our clients, asking us for additional functionality and features (which we provide at no cost – development is simply a cost of doing business for us).
Please reach out for a demo of the Vault & let us show you how we can streamline and professionalize your firm’s investment data management and distribution effort.