Tamale RMS® is SS&C Advent’s award-winning research management solution, designed to help firms make more effective use of all the research data pouring into their offices, and ultimately make better-informed investment decisions more efficiently.
While a number of investment firms use SS&C Advent’s Tamale RMS to organize their research on listed companies, a growing segment of our client base uses the platform for “manager of managers” due diligence – to keep tabs on external portfolio managers through whom they invest. These clients tend to be institutional allocators such as pension funds or endowments, but also include firms like Cornerstone Advisors, a multi-family office and private wealth manager in the Pacific Northwest. Cornerstone does not pick stocks or recommend investments to its clients, but instead develops allocation strategies appropriate to each client’s asset mix, then engages specialized third-party portfolio and fund managers to execute.
Before implementing Tamale, monitoring these external managers was a challenge. Information was scattered among teams on shared drives, in email archives or on individual desktops. “We didn’t have a central location for housing information on our managers,” said John Canorro, Cornerstone’s Managing Director for Operational Due Diligence. “There wasn’t one place where anyone could go and see investment notes, emails, account statements, or other relevant documents.” John and others in the firm – including the IT department – began pushing for a more consolidated, database-driven approach.
Relief came with the addition of Tamale to the firm’s existing suite of SS&C Advent solutions. “If I want to look at all the communications we’ve had with a manager or whether a certain issue has been resolved, I can go to one place as opposed to having to hunt around in four or five different places,” John says. As the centralized, go-to repository on all manager matters, Tamale has brought increased efficiency and time savings to the firm, while making it much easier to monitor its managers’ activity and performance. Tamale also helps the firm meet its compliance obligations and demonstrate that it is conducting systematic oversight of its clients’ assets.
Cornerstone’s operations further streamlined when the firm migrated to the web-based version of Tamale last year. More people within the company became comfortable using the platform, and now the investment teams are able to access manager information remotely. The Tamale team has put a lot of energy into enhancing the web and mobile experience, and from Cornerstone’s perspective that effort has clearly paid off.
To see how Tamale has helped Cornerstone Advisors strengthen due diligence, compliance and data integrity. Read the full case study or contact us to learn more.