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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
