A global wealth management company needed a research support solution for its fund managers

The client had diversified interests in the financial services industry and wished to monitor key developments globally. They were keen to partner with a virtual team located at an offshore location – a team that was well-versed in financial concepts and research; that understood their complex products, services and competitive landscape; and that they could work with seamlessly to support their investment activities.

Some of the challenges that the client was hoping to address included

• Managing a pipeline of multiple requests simultaneously that competed for analyst bandwidth
• The lack of adequately qualified local analysts who could support the research requests from a large number of fund managers
• A high attrition level amongst their in-house analysts
• Rising salary costs
• Fragmented research support leading to inefficiencies

A qualified, trained and dedicated team + stringent processes

ValueNotes provided the client with a dedicated research team that could research all asset classes. Since the client required a team that was well versed in financial concepts and could work with highly complex and diverse financial products, services and competitive landscape, ValueNotes:
– Staffed the team with Chartered Accountants, MBAs and CFAs
– Conducted in-house training to attune the team to the unique markets
– Held regular knowledge sessions discussing the key areas that affected the client’s business

At all times, some level of redundancy is maintained among the trained pool of analysts at ValueNotes’ end. This ensures that even if one of the team members is not present, the client’s work can continue uninterrupted.

Well defined workflow processes have been set up with gate-keepers at both ends to ensure that projects are addressed according to the priorities assigned to them. Stringent quality processes enables the ValueNotes team to deliver high quality outputs consistently.

Reliable research support enabled the fund managers to improve their productivity

The engagement started at a slow pace as asset managers “tested” the team with smaller / non-core projects. As their confidence levels grew, more complex / crucial work was sent offshore. After the first review, the as yet non-participating managers also lined up projects. Fund managers began to demand exclusive team space. The team moved from simple research projects, to build and maintain projects, financial modelling, domain intensive projects, and finally investment partnership projects.

Currently, ValueNotes’ value-added research supports decision-making at the highest levels in the client’s organization. By outsourcing research to ValueNotes, the client has been able to significantly reduce research-related costs, focus on their core business activity, streamline and centralize their internal research processes, and assure their fund managers seamless research delivery.

“With just one two-month project we recovered the cost of a year’s engagement”
– Senior Fund Manager heading the offshoring initiative