Wealth managers have a lot to gain from private equity investing, but handling private equity statements will consume a lot of time.
Recently, we've noticed more of our wealth management pursue private equity investments
It may sound anecdotal, but what we've observed is part of a bigger trend.
While investing in private equity (PE) has typically been reserved for large institutional investors, it's now increasingly accessible to smaller advisories. PE firms recognize the trillions in capital "left on the table," and they're finding ways to attract that capital.
And there's good reason for wealth managers to pursue private equity. Private equity continues to outperform public markets, according to the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association.
The reason we mention our wealth management clients going in to private equity is because they've come to us for help (more on that later).
The risks of private equity from an investment standpoint are well known, but what's overlooked is the amount of follow-up work.
Handling private equity is a highly manual and repetitive process.
With PE comes statements: capital calls, distributions, K1s, valuations...
These statements can come in at random times, and/or they'll come in at all once like a flood.
With limited time and tight deadlines, wealth mangers have to process these statements in a timely manner, often stopping everything else they're doing to get these done.
The processes are are very manual and repetitive, and handling one statement alone can easily take 10 minutes.
And with perhaps dozens of statements coming in, the whole process could several hours.
That's a lot of downloading, uploading, renaming, saving, storing, formatting, extracting, inputting, copying, pasting, inputting, emailing and notifying.
Yes, handling the statements is important, but CFA and CFP holders shouldn't spend their time on manual work.
In short, there's got to be a better way.
At Empaxis, we know the challenges associated with PE processing. That's why we've built automated tools to handle this.
By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we program bots to recognize and retrieve the statements via email or web portals. If it's a manual, straightforward, and repetitive process like private equity, it works.
From there, we can automate the entire process thereafter: downloading the statements, renaming and storing files, extracting data from PDFs and placing into an Excel sheet, and sending internal emails and notifications.
We set up the bots in your environment, and we'll maintain them. So, if any processes change, we can reprogram the bots to ensure the automation works properly.
The bots operate mostly behind the scenes, so some of the processes you can't "see", but most importantly and rest assured, you'll see the end result.
We've been helping family offices and other large institutions with these very processes. Now that smaller- and medium-sized wealth management firms have PE investments of their own, we help them too.
It's great that more and more wealth managers have access to private equity, but the statements are more work than they realize.
Don't let the follow-up work bog you down; just focus on the investing itself. By leveraging automation, you can streamline the processes, and Empaxis can help you save a significant amount of time and money.
Curious to learn more? Feel free to reach out; we respond in a timely manner. Whether you're simply exploring options or ready to get started, we can help at any step.
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