Lionpoint Group帮助私募股权公司和投资者对投资基金和投资组合管理进行建模和分析

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Henri Wajsblat, Anaplan’s Head of Financial Services Solutions, interviewed Anaplan partner and Lionpoint Group Managing Director Jonathan Balkin about how new technology solutions can help the private equity sector improve fund of funds (FoF) portfolio management.

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Lionpoint Group recently released a Private Equity Portfolio Monitoring – Fund of Funds app on the Anaplan App Hub. Can you share some of the business challenges within the private equity industry that inspired you to build this new app?

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Data transparency, monitoring, and reporting are increasingly challenging tasks for private equity. As the asset class has matured, the amount of opaque private data related to thousands of funds and investments has outpaced the operational capabilities of managers and investors alike. With evolving regulatory requirements and heightened investor scrutiny of returns, exposures, and fees, private equity managers are looking to new technology for improved insight into their data.

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There are now more than 17,000 active private equity funds in existence, with a record 2,022 funds currently raising capital in the market.¹ Tracking key fund metrics such as distribution to paid in (DPI), total value to paid in (TVPI), and internal rate of return (IRR)—as well as static data such as vintage year, geography, industry, fund size, and fund type—already presents a sizeable data management challenge.

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Add even more data points related to underlying portfolio companies (enterprise value, cost, market value, EBITDA, etc.) into the mix and the challenges begin to multiply further. Many of the existing systems that private equity managers have in place, be it external software or internal systems built by firms themselves, simply can’t cope with the sheer scale and structure of the data set.

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The consequence that comes from using this lacking technology is inefficiency. At many private equity – Fund of Funds firms, investment professionals increasingly find themselves focusing on lower value work, such as reconciling data, fixing spreadsheets, and developing reporting workarounds, rather than analysis and investment strategy.

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This can in turn impact investor relations (IR), as an industry or geography query by an important limited partner can result in a scramble between operations, compliance, IR, and the front office to deliver the correct answer. Such inefficiencies have finally reached a tipping point, leading private equity firms to explore new technology to improve their data analysis and modeling.

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How have incumbent technologies responded to this business issue and have you identified any pitfalls?

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Many software vendors have tried to solve the – Fund of Funds data challenge with varying levels of success.

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First attempts were focused on building proprietary, centralized databases from which managers could access and analyze data gleaned from public sources and/or data that was manually captured from financial statements and investor reporting. However, the data quality of these databases was either inconsistent or did not go far enough into the detailed levels of financials, cash flows, and underlying metrics that private equity managers were seeking. Many private equity managers simply ended up extracting data from such systems and then worked within spreadsheets as the primary reporting layer.

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More recently, vendors and service providers have tried to support – Fund of Funds data aggregation through the modification of accounting systems or by offering a managed service, supported by data collection automation. However, these solutions become limited by their own design in that deviances from a standard data collection template or a particular reporting model must be built by the vendor’s development team. This ends up leading to delays and cost increases. Private equity managers instead want the control and flexibility to access, map, and model data in a way that makes sense to their own end users while maintaining a high level of data quality and governance.

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Finally, integration with other source systems can be one of the key limitations with incumbent – Fund of Funds technologies. Where a manager is looking to consolidate and reconcile data between multiple systems (such as accounting systems, CRMs, etc.), legacy applications often require complex data management builds. Few solutions have yet to reap the benefits of cloud technology, which include reducing the need for complex data warehouses and internally supported IT environments.

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How would you describe the benefits that your Private Equity Portfolio Monitoring – Fund of Funds app provides to private equity firms?

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Lionpoint’s Private Equity Portfolio Monitoring – Fund of Funds app takes data from source systems and/or Excel® and gives the end user the ability to analyze all key financial, operational, and performance data of their funds.

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The model allows users to determine exposure across industry sectors and geographies, and view data easily in a centralized platform. The model produces key statistics such as commitment, remaining commitment, total contributed / distributed, net asset value, return on investment, DPI, TVPI, and IRR for underlying fund investments and their underlying portfolio of assets. The dashboards and visualizations enable firm management and investment analysts to answer critical questions from investors and executives to prepare insights and analytics for use across the firm.

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The key benefits of the app are supported by the core functionality of the Anaplan platform. The solution provides many of the benefits of a traditional data warehouse while lending itself as an easy-to-use cloud-based platform for business users. It can serve as a tool for receiving information from multiple internal and external sources, such as administrators and operating partners, to model and evaluate cash flow data at the investment and investor levels. Anaplan’s platform also has the computing power needed to handle the volumes of data that would otherwise cause performance issues within a spreadsheet-based application.

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Lastly, it’s flexible. Firms that utilize the Lionpoint app can easily customize and adapt the reporting and data capture elements to their own requirements. The Anaplan solution puts the control back in the hands of business users by enabling them to build the models that are useful to them. For private equity firms, this translates into gaining efficient and valuable insights in a competitive market.

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For more information on Lionpoint Group’s Private Equity Private Equity Portfolio Monitoring – Fund of Funds app and to learn how Lionpoint Group helps private equity firms improve transparency and performance management, explore the app on the Anaplan App Hub and read Lionpoint Group’s “Anaplan for Private Equity” brochure.

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¹ “Preqin Quarterly Update: Private Equity & Venture Capital Q3 2017,” Preqin Ltd, November 1, 2017. http://docs.preqin.com/quarterly/pe/Preqin-Quarterly-Private-Equity-Update-Q3-2017.pdf.

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anplan金融服务解决方案主管Henri Wajsblat采访了anplan合伙人、Lionpoint Group董事总经理Jonathan Balkin，探讨了新技术解决方案如何帮助私募股权行业改善基金的基金(FoF)投资组合管理。

Lionpoint Group最近发布了一份私募股权投资组合监测-基金的基金应用程序在anplan App Hub上。你能分享一些启发你开发这个新应用的私募股权行业的商业挑战吗?

对私募股权来说，数据透明、监控和报告是越来越具有挑战性的任务。随着这一资产类别的成熟，与数千只基金和投资相关的不透明私人数据的数量已经超过了基金经理和投资者的运营能力。随着监管要求的不断变化，以及投资者对回报、风险敞口和费用的审查越来越严格，私募股权管理公司正在寻求新技术，以提高对其数据的洞察力。

目前，活跃的私人股本基金超过1.7万只，目前在市场上筹集资金的基金达到创纪录的2022只。¹跟踪关键的基金指标，如分配到已付收益(DPI)、总价值到已付收益(TVPI)和内部收益率(IRR)，以及静态数据，如年份、地理、行业、基金规模和基金类型，已经提出了一个相当大的数据管理挑战。

再加上更多与潜在投资组合公司相关的数据点(企业价值、成本、市场价值、EBITDA等)，挑战就会进一步增加。私募股权管理公司现有的许多系统，无论是外部软件还是公司自己构建的内部系统，都无法应对数据集的庞大规模和结构。

使用这种缺乏技术的后果是效率低下。在许多私募股权-基金的基金公司，投资专业人士越来越多地发现自己专注于低价值的工作，如协调数据、修改电子表格和开发报告变通方案，而不是分析和投资策略。

这反过来又会影响投资者关系(IR)，因为重要的有限合伙人提出的行业或地理查询可能会导致运营、合规、IR和前台之间的争夺，以提供正确的答案。这种低效率最终达到了一个临界点，促使私人股本公司探索新技术，以改进它们的数据分析和建模。

现有的技术是如何应对这个业务问题的?您是否发现了任何缺陷?

许多软件供应商已经尝试解决“基金的基金”数据挑战，并取得了不同程度的成功。

最初的尝试集中在建立专有的、集中的数据库，管理人员可以从中访问和分析从公共来源收集的数据和/或从财务报表和投资者报告中手动捕获的数据。然而，这些数据库的数据质量要么不一致，要么没有深入到私人股本经理所寻求的财务、现金流和基本指标的详细水平。许多私募股权基金经理最终只是从这些系统中提取数据，然后在电子表格中工作，作为主要的报告层。

最近，供应商和服务提供者试图通过修改会计系统或提供由数据收集自动化支持的托管服务来支持基金的基金数据聚合。然而，这些解决方案受到其自身设计的限制，因为来自标准数据收集模板或特定报告模型的偏差必须由供应商的开发团队构建。这最终导致延误和成本增加。相反，私募股权管理公司希望以一种对他们自己的最终用户有意义的方式控制和灵活地访问、映射和建模数据，同时保持高水平的数据质量和治理。

最后，与其他源系统的集成可能是现有的“基金的基金”技术的主要限制之一。当管理人员希望在多个系统(如会计系统、crm等)之间合并和协调数据时，遗留应用程序通常需要构建复杂的数据管理。很少有解决方案能够获得云技术的好处，包括减少对复杂数据仓库和内部支持的IT环境的需求。

您如何描述您的私募股权投资组合监控-基金的基金应用程序为私募股权公司提供的好处?

Lionpoint的私募股权投资组合监控-基金的基金应用程序从源系统和/或Excel®获取数据，并使最终用户能够分析其基金的所有关键财务，运营和绩效数据。

该模型允许用户确定跨行业部门和地理位置的风险，并在集中平台中轻松查看数据。该模型为基础基金投资及其基础资产组合产生关键统计数据，如承诺、剩余承诺、总贡献/分配、净资产价值、投资回报率、DPI、TVPI和IRR。仪表板和可视化使公司管理层和投资分析师能够回答投资者和高管提出的关键问题，为整个公司提供见解和分析。

该应用程序的主要优点是由anplan平台的核心功能支持。该解决方案提供了传统数据仓库的许多优点，同时为业务用户提供了一个易于使用的基于云的平台。它可以作为从多个内部和外部来源(例如管理员和运营合作伙伴)接收信息的工具，在投资和投资者级别对现金流数据进行建模和评估。anplan的平台还具有处理大量数据所需的计算能力，否则会在基于电子表格的应用程序中导致性能问题。

最后，它是灵活的。使用Lionpoint应用程序的公司可以轻松地根据自己的需求定制和调整报告和数据捕获元素。anplan解决方案使业务用户能够构建对他们有用的模型，从而将控制权交还给他们。对于私募股权公司来说，这意味着在竞争激烈的市场中获得有效而有价值的见解。

有关Lionpoint Group的私募股权投资组合监控-基金的基金应用程序的更多信息，以及了解Lionpoint Group如何帮助私募股权公司提高透明度和绩效管理，探索应用程序在anplan App Hub上阅读Lionpoint Group的私人股本计划”小册子。

¹“Preqin季度更新:2017年第三季度私募股权和风险投资”，Preqin Ltd, 2017年11月1日。http://docs.preqin.com/quarterly/pe/preqin -季度私人股本-更新第三季- 2017. - pdf。