Anthemis completes LP reports in a matter of seconds
With Vestberry, Anthemis can easily access smart dashboards built on quality data it can trust. Less time spent on data management, less time spent on uncovering errors in data, less time spent on reporting, and real-time collaboration improves the day-to-day efficiency of Anthemis’ operations.
About Anthemis Group
Anthemis Group is a global platform that cultivates change in the financial system by investing in, growing, and sustaining businesses committed to resiliency, transparency, access, and equity. Founded in 2010, and now with an AUM of $1.2 billion, Anthemis has over recent years supported more than 200 portfolio companies in industries such as retail banking, consumer finance, corporate banking, and insurtech. Anthemis prides itself on being one of the earliest and most prolific investors in fintech across North America and Europe.
Anthemis implemented Vestberry, a portfolio monitoring platform, in the summer of 2019. The company wanted to support its expansion with solid data management via a complex middle-office software solution. It was looking to automate its workflows, make data easily accessible to the wider Anthemis team, and prevent human errors. Managing the growing operation was not sustainable while using standard spreadsheets.
Anthemis identified 3 areas of improvement following its implementation of Vestberry
Seamless
team collaboration and access to data
Faster
LP reporting workflow
Better
data quality and fewer manual tasks
The Client’s Background
Prior to implementing Vestberry, Anthemis had been maintaining its investment and performance-related data in a somewhat antiquated offline platform. Each vehicle (prior to implementation, Anthemis had 6 active vehicles) had its own dedicated spreadsheet, in which the Anthemis team was inputting asset, investment, and cap table data. These offline platforms were updated on a quarterly basis to reflect changes from any investment activity within the quarter, as well as fair value changes of the various assets.
As Anthemis grew in terms of vehicles managed / assets invested in, it became increasingly challenging for its team to simultaneously maintain one offline platform for each of the company’s live vehicles, and update it in an accurate and timely manner.
The Client’s Challenges
Challenge 1 — Easily accessible investment data and performance metrics
The previous approach meant that the Anthemis team had to access a file to retrieve any necessary datapoint, as opposed to accessing an online platform / system. Furthermore, given the “one vehicle, one master file” approach, ag- gregated investment data was not readily available (e.g. total number of investments, or total deployed capital across all vehicles managed by the Anthemis platform).
Challenge 2 — Real-time team collaboration
Team collaboration using an offline platform was proving troublesome. Two people could not edit the same file simul- taneously. Oftentimes, simultaneous editing was resulting in file duplication
Challenge 3 — Maintaining the master files and tracking changes
The addition of new assets into a portfolio, or the introduction of a new datapoint which was not previously captured, meant that the structure of a master file had to be changed. This meant that errors in formulas, or links between spreadsheets in the same file, could occur. Furthermore, another challenge Anthemis faced was the auditability of changes over time within its offline platform.
We wanted to work with a platform provider who was focusing more on VCs / earlier-stage funds and understood the particularities and needs associated with their investment activity. We did not want to work with an “incumbent” provider, given that the functionality of their platforms were more PE-focused.
The solution, powered by Vestberry
Single source of truth
In Vestberry, investment vehicles have all their portfolio-related data gathered together in one place. Vestberry provides the right data architecture to accommodate the specific requirements of portfolio management. Clients can rely on a robust database with best-in-market data granularity to consolidate diverse data in different formats from various sources. In this way, Vestberry keeps Anthemis’ data well-organized, protected, updated in real-time, and accessible to various stakeholders.
Excel Add-in
With Vestberry’s Excel add-in (available for both Windows and Mac), Anthemis can retrieve data in real-time, directly from Vestberry, to an Excel spreadsheet and deliver fully customizable reports, faster. According to Nikolakis, this saves Anthemis considerable time, as they no longer have to struggle with copying/pasting data, co-editing errors, or formula mistakes.
“Thanks to the Vestberry Excel add-in, we now complete quarterly LP reports, as well as other performance-related internal reports, in a matter of seconds. This has released a considerable amount of man-hours from the Anthemis team each quarter, allowing it to focus on more value-additive work streams and tasks.”
Iason NIKOLAKIS, Partner @ Anthemis
Audit log
With Vestberry, all data inputs and edits are carefully tracked – Anthemis can now see historical records of data points being inputted, edited, or deleted. This helps uncover and quickly remedy any inaccuracies that occur before data integrity across the platform is compromised.
“With Vestberry, we no longer have to maintain the offline platform we were using until 2019. Errors can now occur only at the point of data entry, however we haven’t had an error since we implemented Vestberry thanks to its audit trail functionality and internal control processes which we have put in place.”
Iason NIKOLAKIS, Partner @ Anthemis
Multicurrency feature
Apart from these key features, Anthemis also benefited from the Multicurrency feature. It allows the team to track investments in various currencies and see consolidated data on a fund or cross-fund level.
On a daily basis, Vestberry retrieves FX rates for the most common currencies from respective central banks (GBP, EUR, USD, CHF, SEK, ILS) and continues to expand the currency pool based on the growing needs of its client portfolio.
Automatically updated FX rates help Anthemis track their investments’ fair value evolution and understand how much FX fluctuations affect it. It is one of the small features in Vestberry that make a big difference in day-to-day efficiency.
Summary
“The biggest advantage of having Vestberry is the platform’s ability to save us significant time and streamline our port- folio monitoring-related workflows. Since we implemented Vestberry, we have grown from 6 to 24 active vehicles (incl. SPVs). From a portfolio monitoring perspective, Vestberry has become an essential tool for us, which we use on a daily basis, and we would not be in a position to accurately manage such a large number of active vehicles without it,” explains Mr. Nikolakis.
With Vestberry, Anthemis can easily access smart dashboards built on quality data it can trust. Less time spent on data management, less time spent on uncovering errors in data, less time spent on reporting, and real-time collaboration improves the day-to-day efficiency of Anthemis’ operations.
Disclaimer: Anthemis Group is not financially affiliated with Vestberry apart from being a Vestberry platform user. The views expressed herein are based on actual use of the Vestberry platform.
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