The most common reason why private equity (PE) groups hesitate to implement firmwide, purpose-built technology is because of the many questions and uncertainties that arise. What will the switch to new technology require? How long will implementation take? Will the new system deliver the same features and benefits of the current tools without any of the downsides? What if people are resistant to adopting a new platform?
Most importantly, PE groups need to know whether the new technology will improve their processes and, consequentially, their profitability.
Technology like Intapp DealCloud promotes better information management to help PE groups work more efficiently and productively. Read on to learn how Women’s World Banking benefitted from implementing DealCloud and discover how the software can better support your own team.
Free your team from outdated, unconnected tools and processes
Women’s World Banking is a global nonprofit that invests in businesses that enable women to achieve economic empowerment. One reason the organization selected DealCloud was because its teams would no longer have to use unconnected and outdated apps and processes (like spreadsheets and email inboxes) for fundraising, target tracking, relationship building, and deal flow management.
“We came to DealCloud as a deal sourcing platform because we were using — basically — a spreadsheet with more than 500 deals,” revealed Angie Goenaga, Senior Investment Associate at Women’s World Banking. “It was becoming too huge of a file, and we couldn’t really include all the interactions that we were having with the companies in the document.”
Spreadsheets may be useful for organizing, visualizing, and analyzing small and static data sets — but the more nuanced and dynamic a general partner’s (GP’s) information becomes, the less helpful spreadsheets can be.
“It became more like a pain point, really, that we needed to solve for,” Goenaga recalled. “We needed a platform that was flexible, that was user-friendly, that could help us visualize our deals and visualize where we’re spending our resources better.”
Thankfully, Women’s World Banking no longer has to search through many rows and columns of data on a single cumbersome spreadsheet. Instead, they now rely on automatic data capture and configurable dashboards.
DealCloud provides visibility into the organization’s relationship-building activities and ties these activities to outcomes, which are then tracked to help leaders decide whether to double down on certain initiatives within a region, product, or sector.
These automations and new views provided more reliable, relevant, and robust insights into the group’s ever-evolving information.
Equip your team with relevant data in real time
DealCloud enables PE firms to track key data points that are customized to their industry focus, and lets firms easily compare these values in ways they couldn’t with generic tools and outdated processes.
“For existing portfolio companies, we can now go back and see all the data points that we want to track in terms of financial performance, in terms of impact for us as an impact investor,” Goenaga said. “For example, we want to see the percentage of women clients, the percentage of women in leadership, the percentage of women staff.”
What used to feel arduous and time-consuming has now become an automatic, streamlined process that involves fewer meetings, phone calls, and administrative work. With DealCloud, GPs like Women’s World Banking can configure custom-built views that give them the most relevant, real-time data they need at any moment. For a gender lens investor like Women’s World Banking, this involves reliable demographic information about leadership roles, personnel turnover, and the customer base.
Empower your investor relations team to funnel knowledge to LPs and intermediaries
After implementing DealCloud, the Women’s World Banking fundraising team was able to spend their time on more critical tasks, such as building valuable and strategic relationships with an increasing number of limited partners (LPs).
“DealCloud has really helped us with LP relationships and track who our target LPs are,” Goenaga said. “Not just the ones that we have in existence, but as we fundraise for more and more funds it’s good to keep track of interactions that we have with them, their interests, what they’re targeting. It helps us create better conversations with them.”
Investing in better tools and processes to support relationship building and fundraising is especially critical in the current market: PitchBook reports that as LPs grappled with skepticism around correcting valuations, capital commitments shrank by more than $1 billion from 2021 to 2022. This decrease in capital translates to an increase in competition for allocators’ time, attention, and trust.
Because institutional investing is such a highly specialized function within PE, the professionals who provide institutional investor services can’t rely on their accounting, administration, and communication skills alone. Instead, investor relations (IR) professionals need to be able to provide real-time data to LPs to help them make multimillion-dollar decisions (often on behalf of middle-class workers).
Before the fund closes, LPs need to know how your fund invests, what your corporate governance looks like, how you report financial and impact performance, and how private capital market shifts or global events will change any of these factors. Most importantly, they need proof that backs up your answers and claims, so they can confidently book capital with you.
By using DealCloud to share up-to-date information on both current (for IR teams) and future capital raising efforts, you can build your reputation as a knowledgeable and proficient PE group.
See how your firm can benefit from DealCloud
Although Women’s World Banking initially implemented DealCloud as its deal sourcing and pipeline management solution, the organization soon realized it could leverage the robust platform for so much more. DealCloud gave Women’s World Banking the ability to monitor and manage its portfolio to create a stronger reputation and build future funds with more aligned, committed LPs.
Schedule a demo of Intapp DealCloud to learn how the software can benefit your PE firm.