SIG offers a tailored investment management experience utilizing Alkymi

Strategic Investment Group (SIG), an industry pioneer in outsourced Chief Investment Officer services, provides sophisticated, customized investment solutions to a select group of clients. With $25.5 billion in discretionary assets under management, and over 60 client portfolios, they process approximately 1,000 private markets documents per month—a process that before Alkymi was manual and tedious. 

To deliver a best-in-class service to their clients, SIG needs to create large volumes of structured data quickly so they are able to spot any portfolio risks and opportunities immediately and make decisions and recommendations for their clients based on those insights.

Before moving to Alkymi, SIG’s process evolved from in-house data entry to using an outsourced third party. Their goal was to save time, but they found that the outsourced workflow required a lot of manual intervention, and ultimately lacked the speed they required. As they began searching and evaluating new solutions, they knew they would benefit from powerful, cutting-edge technology that would give them more control without sacrificing speed or accuracy. They also wanted something user-friendly that would scale and help them achieve their automation and data quality goals.

With Alkymi, they found more than that—they also found a solution that allowed their teams to automate additional business processes and repetitive tasks, including core, high-volume use cases such as Capital Notices and Capital Account Statements, and unique use cases such as their proprietary questionnaires and surveys through which they gather data for their annual Sustainability Report.

Speed was their biggest hurdle

SIG understands that each client is unique and requires portfolios specifically tailored to their individual goals and risk preferences. This portfolio diversity means they process more than 10,000 capital account statements and notices each year for their clients.

Speed was their biggest challenge, with employee development another high priority. Any slowdowns in the process or missed deadlines could impact clients, and their original process required dedicated team members doing the tedious, manual work of downloading and transcribing data from PDFs. The team wanted to spend their time doing more valuable work, where they could make more impactful strategic contributions to the firm. How could they increase speed, maintain accuracy, and prevent employee burnout?

Their initial solution, an outsourced third-party solution, helped speed up their previously labor-intensive process, but the team was still spending significant time interacting with the vendor, lacked control over timing, and had limited access to the data being produced by their vendor.

Knowing that this wasn’t the right solution for them, they began to reevaluate their strategy. They needed a way to automate manual processes while retaining access, control and oversight over their critical data—all without burning out their team.

“Alkymi is a partner in our digital transformation and is helping us achieve our scalability and data quality goals. Their hands-on service is exactly what we need to meet clients’ expectations. With Alkymi in our workflow, we can be confident in the data output from our documents and have full control over the process.”

Alkymi increased SIG’s control over its data, while automating end-to-end data capture and transformation

SIG selected Alkymi to automate the collection, extraction, transformation and review process for capital account statements and notices. It fit seamlessly into their workflow, allowing them to adopt a process that they control and manage themselves. Alkymi helped SIG nearly eliminate the number of hours spent on manual data entry while bringing a critical workflow in-house, removing the uncertainty that came with working with an outsourced vendor that was not meeting their business needs. In the first six months of working with Alkymi, SIG has generated over 25,000 data points from their Capital Call Notices and over 120,000 data points from their Capital Account Statements—a total of more than 145,000 clean, structured and actionable data points, in a fraction of the time it would take to perform the same tasks manually.

Utilizing Alkymi’s portal download service in tandem with Capital Call Notices and Capital Account Statement Patterns has made what was once tedious, manual work for SIG analysts more strategic by transitioning them to a reviewer and overseer, leveraging their subject-matter expertise to action data extracts only when needed. They no longer have to manually source and handle the documents and instead can use Alkymi to be confident in the data and output and track their progress. Separate data import has even been eliminated, with a direct connection between Alkymi and SIG’s database.

“For our people, it’s a motivational tool that can improve their job and allow them to work on higher level tasks. We can retain more of our talented employees and help them grow in their careers by giving them more strategic work.”

The easy-to-use Alkymi platform gives SIG complete oversight of the data and allows them to validate the data before sending it to their systems where it can be put to work instantly. Alkymi enables their Business and Investment Analysts to take control of their data before it is exported directly into their workflow and pricing tools.

SIG can now process reconciliations faster and ensure a clean portfolio on a daily basis, and their team is more motivated and freed up to focus on higher level tasks. As they have rolled out Alkymi and shared the results across the company, SIG employees are excited about the opportunity to identify new workflows to automate and explore creating their own patterns.

“We demoed Alkymi internally at a lunch and learn, and that’s when people started saying, ‘Oh, this could help me too.’”

SIG is now transforming unstructured data into actionable data across their business

After seeing the results for Capital Calls and Capital Account Statements, SIG is now utilizing Alkymi’s Patterns Studio to process, aggregate and transform responses from their annual DEI Questionnaire and DEI Survey, automating the data collection and streamlining a historically manual process.

For the 2023 survey, Alkymi has processed 120 unique Excel spreadsheets submitted by SIG clients and imported into Data Inbox, with over 25,000 data points extracted. Patterns Studio allowed SIG to automate the extraction of data elements from the spreadsheets, so the data can be aggregated and inconsistencies can be flagged and modified, saving approximately 300 hours in manual work over previous years by automating this workflow alone. By mapping descriptions on the Excel sheets to survey codes created by SIG using a Data Mapping Transformation built in Alkymi’s new Data Transformer tool, the data can be exported in an organized, actionable format. 

Empowering employees to further automate their workflows

After successfully partnering with Alkymi, SIG continues to explore additional opportunities for automation using the platform. SIG is currently training their business and investment analyst teams to use Patterns Studio to build Patterns on their own. By creating their own Patterns, they will not only be able to automate more workflows, but will also be able to give their employees more opportunities for growth and to contribute to the success of the business.

With significant volumes of data flowing through their systems on a daily basis, SIG was looking for a solution to automate their workflows, specifically for high-volume use cases like Capital Notices and Capital Account Statements. What they found instead was an opportunity to transform their unstructured data into actionable data across their business. Partnering with Alkymi has helped SIG achieve their goals around automation and data quality and has empowered their employees to uncover new opportunities to automate, all while taking control of their data and operations.