Leading Investment Manager finds accuracy with Alkymi

With over 100 clients and billions in investment assets under their direction, a leading US-based Investment Management Firm sought to find a solution for their unstructured data challenges. To have full oversight into their portfolio and be able to provide a personalized service to their clients, they need to quickly and accurately process hundreds of detailed investment manager letters and reports each month.

They explored multiple third-party solutions, from a simple optical character recognition (OCR) application to more sophisticated intelligent document processing solutions. Their team struggled to find a platform that was fast, reliable, and most importantly, produced clean, actionable data consistently.

Finding Alkymi enabled the firm to easily create standardized, error-free data sets from their documents, no matter the format. With accurate data sent directly to their data warehouse, they’ve fully automated their investment manager data workflow with straight-through processing. Their fund managers can now access current information for their portfolios and trust that the data is correct.

Overseeing multiple markets and investment strategies

For this firm, portfolio management involves a personalized approach for each client and a comprehensive understanding of multiple markets and investment strategies. Each of their underlying investment managers submits monthly or quarterly letters, highlighting investments, exposures, and activity in detail—data that needs to be inputted into their systems for their teams to review.

With over 4,000 letters from hundreds of managers submitted each year in varied formats, automating the process effectively and with a high rate of accuracy was a priority. Ideally, they wanted a tool that their team could operate themselves with limited oversight.

Finding the right solution proved to be a challenge. Initially, they used an in-house application, built with OCR to parse PDFs and find key information. While more advanced and faster than manual data entry, the process was still slow and prone to inaccuracies. An investment analytics platform had similar accuracy challenges. In addition to the cost, they needed to divert team resources for data governance and oversight, muting any benefits from reduced manual processing and frustrating the team.

Other third-party intelligent document processing solutions in the market were also ineffective. Producing clean, error-free data was essential, and many platforms weren’t able to meet that requirement with such varied document types and formats. The firm needed a tool they could trust to extract, process, and transform their data correctly, every time.

“Everybody said they had a mouse trap, and they just didn’t. When [a colleague] saw Alkymi, he said, ‘I think this thing actually works.’”

Alkymi enabled them to automate multiple workflows

After a colleague’s recommendation, the firm selected Alkymi to process their investment manager letters and create standardized, validated data sets, using Alkymi’s Patterns Studio toolkit. Data from each letter is automatically extracted, processed, and transformed, and the validated data is sent via Alkymi’s API directly to the firm’s data warehouse. Their fund managers can then easily find accurate allocation and exposure information for their client portfolios, without any additional manual verification.

With a solution that their team could run themselves, they could deliver accurate data and offer a more engaging work environment, without time spent on manual data or close oversight to correct inaccuracies. Using Alkymi, they now run over 60 automated workflows for their different investment managers, creating unique Patterns based on the different formats.

“The people in our Operations group have been curious about machine learning. They can be earlier in their career, and it’s much more engaging for them. With manual data entry, they’re not going to stick around more than a couple of years. They stick around longer when they get projects like this and when they get to engage with a tool like Alkymi.”

Capturing accurate data with straight-through processing

Using Alkymi, the firm has seen much higher accuracy in their data extraction and transformation than with previous platforms and workflows. With a higher level of trust in the data output, they can now utilize straight-through processing and offer a touchless experience for their end-users, who can seamlessly access the latest data from their investment manager letters in their data warehouse.

Since launching their first Patterns with Alkymi, the firm has generated over 1.8 million actionable data points from their manager letters, with over 1 million in 2023 alone.

After a prolonged search for a solution that could meet their needs and deliver precise data processing, this investment management firm has now fully automated processing their investment manager letters with a high degree of accuracy.

“What is most powerful is that Alkymi gets data that was unstructured and makes it structured, and that’s the edge—all of these tools on the front-end, the analytics, they don’t mean anything unless the data underneath is solid. Alkymi solves the data problem, and then you have what you need to make the investment decisions.”