For the last three years, we’ve brought a group of Tamale RMS clients together for networking with SS&C Advent representatives and partners. It’s the opportunity for us to share our plans for Tamale, and to get feedback and ideas from users that will inform our product roadmap. It’s also a chance for clients to interact and learn about the different ways firms are using our research management solution – and in many cases, even learning something new.
At our most recent Tamale event in New York City, we added a twist to the agenda. Because many firms use Tamale to track research on funds and managers, organize their due diligence process, and to select managers, we invited Sterling Diligence, experts in pre-investment due diligence and C-suite screening to discuss the importance of background investigations on fund managers. The presentation was enlightening, with our speakers from Sterling Diligence, Heather Morison, and Pam Panzarino sharing stories of suspect behavior in the fund industry and the dire consequences of inadequate underwriting for investors. Sterling emphasized the importance of pre-investment due diligence, executive level screening, and what to look for in a due diligence company. Some tips discussed were:
- Never to rely solely on relationships and skip the entire due diligence process.
- Be aware of companies that can create reports “fast and cheap.” Generally these are data dumps or canned reports without human oversight/review to triangulate the data.
- Look for a company that provides white glove service, advanced technology and an experienced team of investigators.
Following the presentation, the group broke out into a roundtable discussion to share thoughts about Tamale functionality. Specifically, we were interested in our clients’ views on three areas the Tamale team is working on: artificial intelligence and machine learning (or AI and ML), workflow and task management, and CRM.
A few key takeaways is AI is remains a hot topic among our clients. Tamale users are very interested in eliminating manual tasks and automating as much as possible. To answer this need, the Tamale team is focusing its AI and machine learning initiatives on auto-tagging and auto-categorization of research content and documents flowing into Tamale for more streamlined indexing of investment research. Clients also expressed the need to take in and organize unstructured data in a wide variety of formats. Near-term plans call for leveraging machine learning to train the system to perform those tasks and free up users to focus on research analysis.
While Tamale is a well-developed Research Management System with CRM functionality, clients are certainly interested in having more robust contact management capabilities, including the ability to mine information on people from the internet, connect the dots between contacts and investments, and visualize relationships among their contacts. Even in our digital age, many clients return from meetings or events with stacks of business cards. The ability to scan those directly into Tamale – a feature on the horizon – will be most welcome.
Discussions like these are essential for us to hear directly from our clients and determine what we can do to enhance Tamale to meet their workflows. Over the next year we’ll be working in a phased delivery approach to add substantial value in each of these three equally important areas. Many thanks to the clients who joined us in New York, and stay tuned to hear about similar events in the future.