About the client

The Client is one of the world’s largest private markets investment managers.

It manages more than 900 institutional investors seeking superior investment returns through private markets for its more than 100 million beneficiaries. It has assets under management of USD 91 billion and more than 1,300 professionals in 20 offices worldwide.

It is focused on private markets through the financing and development of large enterprises, desirable real estate, and essential infrastructure.

Your Approach to Investments

It follows a globally integrated investment approach across private market asset classes, allowing them to build flexible portfolios that can adapt their investment strategy should market conditions change, including three investment strategies: direct, secondary and integrated investments.

About your operation

Describe a little about the management of entities and contracts at a high level.

About the Collaboration with ABP

The Private Equity industry is undergoing multiple changes in the midst of a challenging environment, with multiple market cycles, regulatory changes, new technologies, new players,… Within this environment, ABP helps its clients to manage the systems more efficiently that allow them to adapt their business model to this environment.

ABP has been providing services to this client for 14 years, during which time the size of the company in terms of both revenue and employees has multiplied by 10, going from operating in 3 countries to having offices in more than 20.

ABP specializes in processes associated with customer management (CRM), with an approach that allows business units to dedicate their efforts to the core of their activity, which consists of defining the strategies with which the organization intends to compete in the market.

The objective has been to provide support to the entire life cycle of business processes: Analysis and optimization, development, deployment, support and facilitation, with the primary objective of ensuring the operability of the Customer Management applications covered within a service agreement, executing the preventive actions that are necessary to avoid problems that affect the work of users and carrying out the required corrective actions.  if something unforeseen occurs.

ABP and its client have continuously worked to improve quality, service and efficiency, through an outsourcing agreement that has allowed it to concentrate on core business activities, reduce costs, shift fixed costs into variable costs and increase service quality.

In order to obtain the full range of benefits possible through outsourcing, the client wanted to partner with a provider that combined extensive business knowledge, quality of service and technical expertise.

About what ABP executes

Within the signed contract, ABP develops its services in two main blocks of functions:

• Management of Customer Management Systems
• Management of Potfolio Management’s systems.

Details of services

Administration of Customer Management Systems

1. Evolutionary Maintenance Service of the Customer Management System.

Objective: To ensure the continuous adaptation of the application of the strategic requirements of Prosegur Activa, providing a high degree of flexibility.

Tasks covered:

• Analysis and documentation of the requirements of the new functionalities to be incorporated into the application.
• Solution Design & Documentation
• Solution development
• Unit Testing
• Built-in and regression testing
• Deployment of new functionalities
• Start-up support
• Training and support for users in new developments.

• Corrective maintenance of the Customer Management System

Objective: To solve with agility and effectiveness the possible incidents that may affect the operability of the CRM System.

Tasks covered:

• Analyse, classify, prioritise and document the incidents detected
• Identify the technical solutions to be implemented
• Develop and document the solution
• Manage actions required by third parties (external systems, other vendors, other departments)
• Recommend measures to avoid recurring incidents
• Develop an action protocol in the event of serious incidents: e.g.: system shutdown, user blockage
• Prepare periodic reports on the evolution of incidents
• Updating Email Templates
• Generation of PDF’s of different system objects

• Tasks related to data refresh
• Matrix/Signature Entity Updates
• Updates of users/permissions and accesses according to changes in roles and corporate organization chart.
  Ensure proper visibility of data according to defined roles.
• Data Maintenance: Corrections, Changes of Values in Tables
• Item/Sub-Item Synchronization
• Updating Master Tables
• Management of data requests from Local Accounts.
• Management of customer access to company portals.
• Participation in uploading data on Accounts related to other projects.
• Territorial Management.
• Other Data Steward Tasks

•  Technical tasks required by the system

Tasks covered

• Implementation of new versions of the application (file transfer, parameterization of server elements, system tests)
• Installation of Patches provided by the manufacturers of the SW
• Database Behavior Analysis (Performance, Volume, and Growth)
• Backup & Recovery Management Support
• Management of alerts associated with server administration reported by Oracle on its website.
• Weekly reports on service-related incidents and list of activities carried out
• Solution Provider Fix
• System Auto-Deployment Scripts
• Service Provider Monitoring

• Maintaining integrations with other systems
• Electronic Signature Systems
• Integration with Requirements Management systems, e.g. Jira
• Semi-liquid: I was able to match a trade to an allocation when the currency is different.

• Development and maintenance of reporting systems.
• Development and maintenance of ETLs for the generation of reports of the existing data in the CRM
• Developments of the data presentation layer.
• Creating Executable Reports
• Modifications and updates to reports

• Ensuring GDPR Compliance
• Data Anonymization – Data Classification
• GDPR Opposition Management and Customer Data Update.

Portfolio Management System Administration

Another of the key systems for generating efficiency in the operations of a Private Equity Manager is the Portfolio Management tool, which allows him to streamline and automate all portfolio monitoring activities, from data collection and standardization to advanced analysis and investor reporting.  Considering the steady rise in business prices, changing regulations, and increasing investor demands

The client uses it to take financial control of the funds that they manage themselves or that they manage jointly with other managers, from eFront they control the purchase/sale of shares, the commitment agreements of investors, the distribution of dividends, the portfolio of assets, the clients, the valuations of their assets, the forecasts of the funds…

2. Modules as such, have practically all those that appear as solutions on the eFront website: eFront Invest (GP & LP Fund Manager, GL & Accounting, Document & CRM Manager, Agreement Manager, Loans), eFront Portfolio Monitoring, eFront Investment Café, eFront Office. Within each module (although I have only seen it in eFront Invest because it is really the one we work with the most) they create different packages that are installed in the application depending on the needs, but I don’t know to what extent they are independent of the module (I mean I don’t know if they are paid separately or not,  I doubt very much that they will be paid separately).

3. Our main task is to maintain the operation of the application, either by fixing what has been previously customized or by creating new customizations, such as auto-filling of fields or permissions by profile or by group of people or by type of record. We also develop our own customization projects for functions that eFront does not offer in a standard way and that due to low demand they do not develop themselves. For example, in PG they have a combination of two types of financial operation that must be treated and calculated in a specific way, because that is developed by us.

We take care of reporting, in the sense of creating reports from scratch that we can print in excel or pdf and the creation of dashboards.

We also do data analysis, although it’s less common. And outside of eFront, although related, we take care of the transfer of information from the eFront database to the common PG database.

4. Efront specialises in private equity (in PG) which is investment in private companies (which are not listed on the stock exchange)

The issue of customization is quite powerful, except for very specific cases that have turned out to be bugs of the eFront itself, everything else can be alleviated with code in the different components (server, screen, permissions, scripts, queries, templates…)

There are also approvals through workflows, and it can be associated with email to send notifications to investors when a trade is registered,…

About How ABP Manages This Type of Services

Relationship and Government Model.

The Relationship and Governance Model formalises the dialogue between the client and those responsible for the services by ABP.

Its objective is to structure information flows, service requests, incidents, etc., at different levels, so that communication is fluid and orderly. To do this, it is necessary to identify people and their roles at different levels, so that decision-making responsibilities are assigned and incident escalation points and procedures are defined.

1. Service Management Tools

Implementation and management of the incident and project management tool:

For the proper coordination and management of all the activities, tasks, documentation, developments and tests carried out, the installation of a tool that supports communication between the different participants of the process and allows the planning and monitoring of the tasks assigned to each of them is proposed.

At ABP, after an exhaustive evaluation process of tools focused on providing this type of support, we have selected JIRA as a Project Management and Communication tool. With it we can cover the entire cycle, starting from the management of knowledge prior to the development of the applications, to the management of their maintenance.

The main actions supported by the tool are:

to.    Document all the information related to each incident/new requirement: Functional Requirement, Technical Design, Solutions, Tests, etc.  Developed codes, etc.

to.    Assign tasks to different team members

b.     Assign estimated task execution times

c.      Monitor the team’s dedication to each of the tasks

d.     Manage the evolution of execution

and. Update the status of each assigned task: Completed, reassigned, rescheduled, etc.

f.      Plan workload, release deliveries, etc.

g.     Facilitate access to all the information by all the members of the teams that is considered appropriate: Users, development teams, test teams, user support teams, etc.

h.     This access is remote since it is a web application, so it will be possible to manage the tasks of all the teams in the different countries in a single way.

• Operating Model for Corrective Maintenance Service:

The customer and ABP will receive incidents, inquiries and support requests issued by end users and/or internal customers. In addition, key users receive operational incidents or are detected in the IT department itself as a result of system monitoring.

Those queries or requests that are not resolved by the first level support and according to the procedure that is established, will be referred to the key users who will be responsible for receiving the request for consultation/support/correction.

The key users will confirm the origin of the incident/request, fill in the information required for the correct resolution of the incident/request, assign priority to the incident/request and communicate the incident/request to the PBL team leader. During the transition phase, the standard information to be included in the request/incident and the procedures for prioritizing incidents and requests will be agreed. Communication and escalation procedures for high-priority incidents will also be agreed.

The ABP team will resolve requests/incidents following the prioritization criteria set by the client.

All incidents/requests will be documented by the PBL team in accordance with the procedures to be agreed during the transition phase.

Once the incident has been resolved, it will be tested and put into production (if necessary), through the specific procedure for putting objects into production for corrective maintenance, either urgently or planned through versioning.

The PBL team will notify, via the management tool, the resolution and closure of the request/incident, either informing of the implementation of the software/data update – if necessary – or communicating the response to the query.

Once the service has been stabilized under the model described, for those incidents and requests of a more common nature and that are standardized, a model of direct communication of these incidents and requests will be proposed.

• Operating Model for the Evolutionary Maintenance Service:

The client’s internal users or customers identify the needs for new functionalities and issue the requirements for the implementation/adaptation in the CRM. In some cases, these requests may have entered through the corrective maintenance circuit and when it is detected that they are evolving, they will be referred to this circuit.

The client, through its functional coordinators, complements the information in the requests (if applicable) with technical and functional coherence requirements. In addition, they produce the functional specifications that allow the definition of the scope and the definition of the requirements to be completed.

The PBL Service proposes the solution and estimates the implementation date, based on the functional specifications. PA accepts the requirement (focus and timing) and generates an approval notification. Normal rollback requests will be planned in the release portfolio, according to the workload of the development team. In case of urgent requests, they will be planned according to the established emergency circuit.

The environments and architectures necessary for the execution of the services will be agreed between PA and the PBL, in the event that there is a specific requirement in this regard. Subsequently, and according to the plan, it will be preceded by the provision of the service by ABP according to the type of evolution and procedure of commissioning production: urgent or normal. The resulting products will be approved by PA.

• Service Management Operating Model

For the implementation of the service, several phases are proposed:

• Transition phase: During this phase of the service, the composition of the interlocutors will be confirmed by both parties and the Service Levels and the content of the reports to be used for the monitoring of the service will be defined, which will be prepared by the PBL team. The duration of this phase is expected to be the first two months of the commissioning of the service.
• Execution phase: During this period, the execution and provision of the services described in this proposal will be carried out.
• Disengagement Phase: During this period, the services and applications will be delivered to PA or a third party designated by it. Annex 6 details the tasks covered in this phase.

Relationship Model: Through periodic follow-up meetings. In order to guarantee the quality of the service and its correct management, a scheme of follow-up meetings with attendees and periodicity is proposed, which will vary depending on the objectives pursued.