How to Evaluate Your Family Office’s Alternative Asset Reporting Process

A Short Checklist to Help Family Offices Identify Alternative Investment Reporting Inefficiencies

Over the past decade, alternative assets have become a mainstay in the portfolios of high-net-worth (HNW) families. According to the 2020 UBS Global Family Office Report, alternative assets—which include private equity, hedge funds and real estate—make up 35% of family office portfolios.

While these investments represent a significant portion of HNW assets, they’re seldom easy to track and report on as a component of the family’s larger wealth picture. Unlike traditional investments like equities and fixed income, alternatives lack concrete public reporting requirements. As a result, investors are dependent on third-party managers to receive timely, accurate data regarding their investments.

Over time, it seems that this dependency has morphed into complacency, where delayed access to alternative asset data is an expectation and manual transcription of hard-copy documents into digital formats is a given. The reality is that the process of tracking and reporting on alternative investments has remained steadily challenging.

But as new solutions emerge and the integration between family office software platforms grows stronger, the boundaries of efficiency are being redrawn.

Still, it can be difficult to pinpoint inefficiencies within a process that has remained largely unaffected for the past decade—and not for lack of want, but for lack of available solutions.

To help family offices identify inefficient processes and manual tasks ripe for automation, SEI Family Office Services partnered with Canoe Intelligence to put together an evaluation checklist featuring questions focused on five key areas of the alternative investment reporting process.

Five Core Family Office Reporting Operations for Alternative Assets:

• Document collection
• Data access
• Data transfer and delivery
• Report creation
• Report analysis

[DOWNLOAD THE ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENT REPORTING PROCESS EVALUATION CHECKLIST NOW]

Post-evaluation, if you’ve found that your family office—like many others—is expending too much time and too many resources manually collecting, normalizing, consolidating and reporting on its alternative assets, it may be time to consider a purpose-built technology solution.

This is where SEI Family Office Services and our friends at Canoe can help.

Using modern, automated tools like Canoe Intelligence and SEI’s Archway Platform, family offices can relieve bottlenecks and bridge gaps commonly associated with aggregating and reporting on alternative assets.

Designed to be tightly integrated, Canoe’s automated approach to digitizing printed copies of alternative investment documents helps family office professionals streamline extraction, validation and delivery of alternative asset data into the Archway Platform.

By leveraging the two systems together, users can eliminate manual data entry and automatically incorporate alternative asset data into the Archway Platform’s specialized suite of family office reporting.

Interested in diving into the benefits of SEI’s strategic partnership with Canoe?

Schedule a call with a member of the SEI Family Office Services team to learn more about how the integration between the Archway Platform and Canoe can help your family office streamline its alternative investment reporting process.