A lot of you out there in institutional investor land like to have your data delivered to you in a specific format. Like Burger King’s customers, you’ve grown accustomed to having it your way.

Of course, it’s your prerogative to request that information is presented by your investment managers in a certain way. But there’s a cost associated with forcing your investment managers to comply with your wishes. Since every investor and consultant has a slightly different set of guidelines defining precisely what kinds of information they want, managers and operators have to employ armies of reporting people to meet your individual requirements.

At present, there is no killer app available to collect and manage all of this data. Consequently, every investor, consultant and manager continues to be forced to develop their own databases and to attempt to massage that data via custom-designed spreadsheets. And that means a lot of manual processing of data.

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