6 Ways to Spot Truly User-Friendly Investment Data Tools

It is 100% right for investment management firms to focus on creating the best possible client user experience (UX) for their LPs in communications, distributions, capital calls, reporting, and more. As markets became more complex and talent grew scarce, firms have realized that internal customer UX is almost as important.

In our previous article Empowering Investment Teams Through User-Friendly Tech and Low-Code Innovation, we examined why firms should be empowering their people to succeed with easy-to-use, self-service technology applications. The rise of generative AI (GenAI), low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools, and purpose-built cloud platforms enable prototyping and iteration, democratize app creation, and bridge IT-department gaps with self-service capabilities tailored to business needs. Further, advanced tools attract and retain top talent by eliminating tedious tasks, enhancing productivity, and allowing employees to focus on strategic initiatives.

If you are browsing the aisles for user-friendly technology, you have to know it when you see it. Let’s delve into six important characteristics of user-friendly investment data technology that enables internal teams to build, iterate, and solve business challenges faster and more effectively. 

READ OUR EBOOK: Discover How Modern Data Platforms Empower Private Market Firms

1. Configurability

Tailoring tech to fit business needs

It’s all about taking control of your data. Configurable tools enable you to manage several aspects of your data, such as integration pipelines, connectivity to outside systems, schemas, definitions, and transformation. A firm can then make the solution fit for purpose for a given organization’s needs. Additionally, a technology leader can work with departments and users to design a solution specific to their respective use cases. For example, a fund accountant in a private credit shop can create data pipelines or configure customized calculations and fee methodologies without queuing up for IT’s help.

Tools that allow firms to customize reusable templates and configure data sources help rapidly generate performance, commitment activity, and returns reports. UX is also about design. Armed with reusable templates, private market managers can tailor easy-on-the-eyes reporting using a variety of formats for client, regulatory, and management documents, like LP letters, capital notices, and underlying asset exposure analyses. User-centric tools offer the flexibility to configure new data points in a low-touch manner.

Configurability also translates to seamless integrations with existing tech layers. If needed, IT can tweak something to align with their specific processes, legacy ways of working, and plug into Excel or internal systems in certain formats. Easy connections to external systems or third-party sources, such as fund administrators, alleviate operational burden and support business use cases, including reporting, analytics, and more.

2. Oversight dashboards

Save time, spot exceptions fast 

User-friendly also means not wasting time combing through data quality exceptions. Data stewards, operations analysts, and business users often don’t have time to focus on each data point to flag exceptions. Automated investment data platforms bubble up exceptions to flag for data quality. Users save time by setting specific data quality checks, for example, in reconciliation tasks for NAV validation.

What’s important, aside from bubbling up data quality exceptions, is enabling users to customize their views to personalize their experience and address exceptions faster. If a solution allows tailored landing pages with unique views to each member of the team, it’s a user-friendly solution. If the team member cannot filter a 100-column dataset to see only the 5 or 10 columns they need, the solution will not be the user's favorite toy — which is what you want it to be. A person’s favorite tech toy is one they can quickly access to obtain the information they need — whether that data is for specific deal structures, data models, or investor communications.

3. Low-code, low-touch

Empower citizen developers  

We are in the early stages of a DIY craze in the form of a low-code, no-code (LCNC) revolution. GenAI’s coding capabilities are a prominent example of how technology has become more accessible to the non-technical business person. As an example, pipelines that often took developer intervention can now be produced by an everyday user in a few clicks. Firms’ need for speed, automation, and agility in developing solutions, combined with a growing reliance on departmental IT, is driving LCNC adoption across financial services.

If an organization can create an army of citizen developers, it can bake innovation into its DNA. Your staff wants to feel empowered. There’s no better way to do so than allowing them to solve their own problems. Each person who can solve their own problems = empowerment.

LCNC tools thrive in environments of open APIs, plug-and-play integration, modular design, and extensibility because they make creating tailored solutions easier and less expensive. And critically, “it facilitates seamless data flow between legacy and modern applications.”  

4. Data access management

Balance security with usability

Flexible user-centric technology products also allow asset and fund managers to have a sense of control in balancing data access and security. Private market funds and hedge funds play in complex investing sandboxes. Using technology to solve for complexity extends to identity and access management functions. Ideally, each client has access to a distinct environment with granular access controls to applications and data.

For example, if a hedge fund is running the popular multi-manager platform strategy, the firm needs to track performance and management fees to allocate correctly, optimize fund performance, and generate accurate investor reporting. They have to do this for each and every portfolio manager while also enabling access to information in a centralized, accurate house view.

In the case of balancing access with security, the right tools will empower employees by muffling the noise with smart permissions that let them focus on what’s important to their function. Technical teams remain in charge of who can access what, but users can easily find what’s relevant without digging through mountains of useless data.

5. Accessibility and inclusive UX

Design for everyone

User experience centers around creating intuitive interaction. Is the design easy to use and visually appealing? Is content logically organized? Can you save views and customize columns to a specific role? Does the tool speak the right language? A user at a private credit fund may want to quickly find loan data or visually display their performance track record, whereas a user from a hedge fund may want easy access to real-time portfolio performance. Another characteristic of user-centric tools is self-guided education through easy access to user guides and documentation aided by a GenAI copilot/digital assistant for quick summarization.

Good UX also requires support for accessibility: a product designed intentionally to be usable by people of all abilities, including those with disabilities or neurodivergence. This boils down once again to tools that offer options. Well-designed tools enable keyboard navigation, prioritize text legibility, color contrast, and tool tips for content. The best tools have a consistent look and feel in terms of buttons, links, fonts, and tonality of copy across the various screens and dashboards.

6. Ease of adoption

No more lengthy instruction booklets for data platforms

Most firms today are working somewhere on the continuum of data transformation. It’s easy for the c-suite to become paralyzed in searching for the best way to pay their technical debt. Or they struggle to cut-and-run on underperforming data solutions the firm has spent years building. Those in the early stages are asking themselves, “How do we get this right?”

Data science leaders are wondering if they made the right choice in operational platforms and data architecture. They are politicking to win buy-in for new technologies and receiving pressure to demonstrate ROI. And nobody wants to rely on a lengthy instruction book to get their new tech up and running. UI/UX begins on day one of integration.

A comprehensive, end-to-end data platform, encompassing data discovery, governance, analytics, and distribution is a modernized, holistic approach. Private credit managers, hedge funds, PEs, and asset managers need technologies that are easily integrated and can be augmented as AUM grows and strategy sophistication grows. The tech should allow for clean, accurate data integration from numerous source systems to aggregate and organize volumes of data into a central, single source of truth.

Data architecture that supports real-time reporting and audit trails can help the firm comply with new financial regulations. Self-service data integration tools help non-technical people manage the end-to-end data pipeline process for ingesting and transforming incoming data feeds without having to code. For more information on change management issues surrounding implementing new technology, visit Modernizing Data Architecture: Involving The Right Stakeholders at the Right Time.

Empowering business users

Trends like the growth of new private fund structures, retailization, and regulatory demands have led to operational complexity. When tech sophistication cannot keep up, business users are left stranded. Users in every department need to take control of their data without such heavy reliance on technical teams. User-friendly tools help firms’ brand reputation; good UI/UX can also help firms win clients and skilled talent. Best of all, it positions a company’s infrastructure as ready to scale in all directions for years to come.