The client:
A global Private Equity firm with multiple office locations, 130+ investments and €40bn in total funds raised. As one of the largest Private Equity firms in the UK, they had over fifty carry and co-investment plan participants.
What value has ATLAS delivered?
- In a 6-week implementation sprint, we delivered a solution that reduced the time it takes to provide participants with their positions from several months to real-time
- Carry plan participants are now able to securely access their positions in real time and drill through to transaction-level data
- ATLAS enables carry plan participants to self-service their own analysis, vastly reducing the number of questions that the plan administrator receives. This has also greatly improved scalability as the firm continues to grow
- Overall, better access to data has strengthened the firm’s carry and co-investment plans as a long-term incentive tool.
What was the initial problem the client faced?
The firm’s carry and co-investment data was held in a legacy database, alongside multiple Excel spreadsheets. Their use of leverage to fund co-investments had added a layer of complexity around how much each individual would borrow and those individuals’ balances and interest rates.
The reporting process was manual, slow and dependent on individual team members. PDF reports were produced on a quarterly basis, often distributed to the plan’s participants months after the quarter end. There were significant concerns around scalability.
The firm needed a robust solution that would enable them to update information with the right controls and processes in place, and to enable as close to real time reporting as possible.
How did the client leverage ATLAS to solve these problems?
The client selected the Carry & Co-Investment module of our ATLAS data platform. Our team loaded the carry & co-investment plan data into ATLAS and developed a mechanism for the business to input data directly into the platform going forwards, thereby decommissioning the legacy database. The necessary calculations and other data transformations were set up in the calculation layer to manage the complexity related to the interest calculations and loan balances. A location was set up to store transactional data.
Our team worked with the business to design a set of Power BI dashboards to be rolled out to all plan participants. These dashboards provide plan participants with secure, real time access to their positions, with the ability to drill through to transaction level data and to slice and dice. We published the combined data via dynamic Power BI dashboards, designed iteratively with the client, providing the individual plan participants with secure, real time access to their positions, and the ability to drill through to transaction-level data and perform analysis.
Established in 2009, Holland Mountain works exclusively with Private Capital managers, supporting them on their journey to ‘Data as an Asset’. Firms leverage our ATLAS data platform to connect and integrate industry standard solutions, and improve the quality of their analytics and reporting. Managers looking to improve their operating model can benefit from our strategic advisory services, systems selection support or implementation services. Holland Mountain was named the best consulting firm for operations and technology in the Drawdown’s Private Equity Service Provider Awards 2022.