Background
Scenarios describe situations in which a YUDU app could be employed, to better illustrate the range of features we offer and the scalability of the apps themselves in meeting diverse client needs.
Munroe Financial Group (MFG) are a fictional private equity firm. As a mid-sized firm they have multiple sub-funds reflecting a diversified portfolio.
Client-relationships are very important in any business, but particularly important in the investment world given the large volumes of capital being exchanged between the client and the private equity firm.
The challenge
MFG have a large number of clients, some of whom have significant amounts of capital invested in the fund. They face issues as far as external communications methods with said clients go mostly because of the scale of communication involved.
On one level, each sub-fund manager must pull together his own data and commentary for communication, and there are the two types of communication to consider – One monthly, giving briefer updates about each sub-fund and the fund’s performance as a whole and the other quarterly, giving more in-depth analysis and commentary – All of this includes both infographic data like charts along with text. At the moment all of this is either distributed via “traditional” digital methods via a password walled section of the website or physically.
Note that most investors are invested in a particular sub-fund (for example: commercial shipping), which means they have to be communicated relevant and specific information and that even at a mid-sized fund like MFG, a large number of sub-fund “strategies” exist that investors must be made aware of.
MFG have decided they want a digital solution to help bring all this together for their clients in an easily accessible way on mobile devices, but they face two other distinct issues. The first being that as a private equity firm, they are extremely cost conscious and cannot justify extravagant expenses on their balance sheet to their investors.
Secondly, all of this data is both proprietary (MFG is not legally obliged to publicly disclose results as a private equity firm) and highly commercially sensitive. This initially made MFG tepid about developing a strategy to reach out to investors with mobile devices.
The solution
MFG were primarily attracted to YUDU because of the level of security we could offer. Alongside standard HTTPS encryption, our Enterprise App solution meant we could build a corporate app for them that didn’t have to be submitted to any app store and could be downloaded by clients from within the password walled section of MFG’s website. From that point the client would then be hit with a second password wall within the app, where he could input his username and password to gain access to it. This helped to allay any fears about security breaches.
The nature of YUDU’s subscriber management system and the ease with which MFG could import existing investors and their login credentials was also something that attracted them. MFG have not, as yet, used subscriber management tools to restrict investors access to their relevant sub-fund folders, but this is something they may do moving forward.
MFG also employed our creative services team to build a bespoke HTML welcome page for them to better reflect their role as a private equity fund. This meant building a navigation page that listed the various categories of investor relations material, breaking it down into folders separated by sub-fund and beyond that level, Quarterly or Monthly reports.
The front-facing welcome page itself was augmented by HTML widgets of general financial indexes, such as the S&P500, where a sub-fund had a relevant index (for example, the Baltic Dry Index for Commercial Shipping) this would be reflected on their relevant category page, which also included some explanatory information about the nature of the sub-fund.
MFG’s small internal team of developers are currently looking at ways in which they can use the YUDU Investor Relation’s app HTML5 support to embed interactive visual representations of data and have already implemented some of the more simple examples of these, such as performance line-charts which can be broken down by year.
The final thing that attracted MFG to YUDU was the nature of the costing package which included a license that allowed them to publish all of their relevant material at a fixed price, with no overheads for download or distribution fees. They were also particularly impressed by how easily their own team understood the YUDU Publisher system, as they were initially worried an investment in enterprise app technology would entail costly re-training of staff to acclimatize themselves to it.