IHS Markit's Educational Series covers important and timely topics for the private markets with thought leaders throughout the industry. Lionpoint features in 3 episodes of this 7 part series.
Episode 1: Creating efficiencies – the most frequent bottlenecks clients need help with and what solutions are best to alleviate bottlenecks.
Jocelyn Lewis, Executive Director of Private Credit at IHS Markit, and Lionpoint Director Mike Tracy discuss regularly recurring themes they see as bottlenecks in creating efficiency throughout many private markets GPs.
While many firms think their issues are unique, there are specific job functions and business divisions that regularly present the biggest challenges with efficiency that centre around people, processes, and legacy technology. Mike discusses how adopting “new” technology, outsourcing and offshoring certain capabilities are seen as “best practices” to alleviate the challenges that managers are experiencing.
Episode 3: Data transparency
Jonathan Balkin, Executive Director and Co-Founder at Lionpoint , is interviewed by Jocelyn Lewis about the core components of a strong operating model built to withstand ever-increasing transparency requirements via data requests from investors. Jonathan provides examples of how teams ranging from the deal team to the back office to investor relations can work more cohesively and efficiently to share the same underlying data curated for their specific purpose.
They discuss manual intervention – is it a necessary evil? Or do automated connections between separate systems really work? And for firms looking to stand out among the crowd in terms of their investor reporting, they identify best practices for tackling additional LP data requests, especially relating to COVID-19.
Episode 6: Data collection and data ingestion – what are the best practices for scale?
In this episode, Lionpoint Director Bill McMahon discusses the ever-increasing volume and cadence of data and information available to analyze, especially regarding the market volatility stemming from COVID-19. In an effort to prevent analysis paralysis, Bill identifies the core data components that private debt managers need to be aware of. He also discusses best practices for automating data collection and the value managers can expect to derive from improving their data collection / ingestion process.
