AssetMetrix reduces report production time from several days to just minutes, and reduces IT dependency for each report

Challenge

AssetMetrix needed to overhaul its reporting technology to satisfy increasingly complex client needs

Founded in 2013 in Munich, AssetMetrix is a spin-off of a successful private equity (PE) fund-of-funds manager. With its private markets DNA, solution-driven mentality, and deep technological expertise, AssetMetrix understands challenges faced by private market firms first-hand. AssetMetrix enables limited partners (LP), general partners (GP), and asset servicers to accelerate their digital transformation in a growing asset class. The company provides outsourcing services around data collection, fund administration, reporting and analysis to enhance the efficiency and scalability of middle and back-office operations.

Reporting is critical to the private capital industry, giving LPs clear valuation, performance and risk insights to the investment portfolio. When asset managers can't create timely and accurate portfolio and performance reports, their LPs lose confidence and may divert future capital to other asset managers. Michael Hoffmann is AssetMetrix's current Deputy Chief Operating Officer (Deputy COO) and responsible for Reporting Product Management and Reporting Services. When he first joined the company, one of Michael’s first initiatives was overhauling the technology used to create client reports.

Prior to Michael joining the company, AssetMetrix combined various platforms for its reporting. One reporting system fetched and organized data, and another system created visualizations. While these solutions seemed feasible on paper, they caused many challenges in practice:

• Time consumption: Designing, producing, and correcting reports took days or often over a week.

• High error rates: Reporting specialists frequently found discrepancies and errors, which required meticulous checking.

• Inflexible reporting: AssetMetrix couldn't re-use already developed reporting solutions for new clients

"For any graph — and our reports are full of graphs — a second solution was required because our reporting tool couldn't produce graphs," Michael explained. "Combining outputs from separate solutions resulted in a long production process, and every time we found an error, we had to investigate two sources, then correct it, and finally combine it again."

AssetMetrix's reporting technology was hampering client value and impairing internal operations. Michael sought an end-to-end reporting solution that could produce high volumes of sophisticated reports reliably and quickly.

Solution

Jaspersoft® lets AssetMetrix create a reporting platform that's reliable, fast, flexible, and pixel-perfect

Michael assembled a cross-functional team of technical and business stakeholders for the selection, planning, and implementation processes. Together, they created thorough criteria for evaluating every potential solution.

In the end, they chose Jaspersoft. According to Michael, the decision to select Jaspersoft boiled down to four reasons.

1. Reliability and out-of-the-box maintainability

Unfortunately, time-consuming errors from integrating two systems were common under AssetMetrix's former reporting solution. Its reporting specialists and developers needed to troubleshoot across multiple platforms and repeatedly re-run reports before resolving issues. Resolutions that should have taken hours would take one day and, sometimes, several days.

Jaspersoft thoroughly tests and optimizes report templates for common use cases. This minimizes the risk of potential errors with manual coding and complex report design processes.

"Jaspersoft allowed us to make a huge leap in reliability," said Michael. "When we need to adjust a report and quickly re-run it, we don't worry about discrepancies from one instance of a report to another. On the other hand, our old system had a much longer production process and more manual steps. If we made any changes to the report, we'd have to recheck all 100 pages of the report from beginning to end."

Additionally, Jaspersoft's centralized data management lets AssetMetrix easily standardize data sources, connections, and queries across reports. This consistency ensures that all reports are accurate and up-to-date, reducing the risk of discrepancies due to inconsistent data handling.

"Jaspersoft helped us build a maintainable solution which doesn't need constant attention from a developer," Michael added. "We eliminated complex infrastructure that involved connecting separate proprietary software and fetching data from different data sources. With Jaspersoft, we purely got to one database and also harmonized data points with clear templates in individual files, a clear configuration database, and a translation database. Jaspersoft's more modern architecture helps us maintain all of them."

2. Report production speed and simplicity

Correcting errors created serious timeline issues under the previous reporting solution. Every adjustment meant re-running reports, and creating new reports and re-running existing ones would take from several hours up to three days.

Challenges arose with too many manual processes, side processes, and imperfect technology interactions. As explained by Michael, this occurs when a reporting solution depends on multiple platforms completing separate tasks.

On the other hand, Jaspersoft speeds up the report production process using multiple specialized features. The platform was built from the ground up to produce reporting deliverables quickly, so it's specialized for many GPs and LPs' exact needs. A few of its features include:

• Caching query results
• Customizable templates
• Drag-and-drop editing
• Intuitive user interface (UI)
• Real-time report updates

"We saw the speed from the very first time we tested Jaspersoft," shared Michael. "The first reports were executed in a couple of seconds. We now generate sophisticated reports with hundreds of pages, and it only takes a minute or two to produce. It's very fast compared to our old reporting engine."

3. Report flexibility and customization

Many GPs and LPs have different ideas of what a good investment report looks like, from the font to the layout. AssetMetrix's previous reporting solution couldn't keep up with many client customization requests, such as specialized layouts, longer reports, and variations.

With Jaspersoft, AssetMetrix can quickly accommodate almost all reporting customizations. Michael's team can meet a greater number of clients' requests relying solely on in-house resources, such as reusable templates and ad hoc reporting tools.

"We've always known that every GP and LP have very specific reporting requirements that are often quite different from another," said Michael. "Layout numbers, fonts, and language are all items that need customization based on the client. It's great to see how we're able to accommodate such customization needs out-of-the-box with our own specialized and quite small IT team without needing to involve Jaspersoft or other external experts."

AssetMetrix also utilizes Jaspersoft's multi-language capabilities, including English, German, and French. Creating polished, professional-looking reports in multiple languages has helped the business expand into other regions.

4. Pixel-perfect reporting

GPs' performance reports must meet specific requirements down to the positioning of text, images, and tables. A poorly laid-out, hard-to-read report can impact the perception of LPs who have trusted the asset manager with invested capital.

Without platforms like Jaspersoft, creating pixel-perfect layouts requires extensive manual processes and specialized technical skills. These IT skills are often challenging to recruit and deploy.

"The main challenge was that we used a combination of two tools," Michael shared. "Both tools produced the output independently, which then had to be combined using a macro and manual work. The result was not pixel-perfect, and quite a lot of manual adjustments were necessary. Hence, having tables and graphs out of one solution in Jaspersoft was a big plus for us."

Jaspersoft features a suite of tools that enable pixel-perfect reporting, including:

• Precise layout control
• Interactive features
• Comprehensive data handling
• Testing and previewing tools
• Support for multiple output forms, such as PDF, HTML, and Excel
• Jaspersoft Studio’s "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor

Results

As a five-year Jaspersoft customer, AssetMetrix supports an expanding customer base with faster report creation and reduced IT dependency per report

With Jaspersoft, AssetMetrix reduced the time to create investment reports from an average of three days to a few minutes. GPs rely on these detailed and timely investment reports to build trust with LPs and justify future funds. This improves both the company's operational efficiency and the client experience.

"We are much more efficient than we were before," Michael concluded. "In 2019, we would spend on average three days and numerous cycles to produce one report, and now we can produce a report, review it, and publish it to our client in a couple of hours, while production as such requires minutes. That's a huge business benefit."

AssetMetrix's reporting volume, viewership, and sophistication have grown parallel with the company's rapid growth. According to Michael, Jaspersoft has significantly helped AssetMetrix grow its business without adding additional business resources.