Harmonate announced the launch of its data operations platform for funds. Until this launch, its services were only available exclusively through a single fund administrator, NES Financial. The fintech now provides a standalone service available to all funds, fund administrators, systems integrators and funds of funds, including those it already serves through its pre-launch engagements.
Kevin Walkup, President and COO of Harmonate, said in a statement: “Our systems, and the combination of both the soft and technical skills needed to migrate organizations to data-driven operations, allows the domain expertise and ideas of our clients to shine through. As data fluent investors press for more transparency, Harmonate allows the middle office to break through the limits of complex pre-digital approaches.”
The platform uses supervised machine learning and exception-based rules to bring more data in more quickly and normalize it so that updates go through the entire fund application system. In addition, data can be uploaded faster and packaged so it can feed into nearly any applications for reporting, metrics, compliance and insights.
“Harmonate was developed in response to transactions that can be abnormally high velocity, complex, involve thousands of limited partners or all of the above within the EB-5 fund and Opportunity Zones fund space,” said Reid Thomas, EVP and general manager of Specialty Financial Administration at NES Financial, in a statement. “Their track record of transforming traditional fund administration and fund of funds environments has driven demand for their services and we welcome the opening of their platform to a larger community.”
Metrics from the data platform’s deployment has shown 20% cost savings in year one of implementation, and 80% savings in ensuing years. Harmonate has also demonstrated a capability to reduce reporting delivery timelines by more than 80%.
Michael Halloran, CEO of Harmonate, said the fintech is addressing the frustration of fund leaders’ experience, “knowing where they want to get, but becoming overwhelmed with the process of decoupling from legacy systems that are holding them back.”
While legacy fund administrators are experiencing increasing pricing pressure and seeking new sources of revenue, Harmonate believes it is supporting the rise of new advanced fund administrators, which have developed a reputation for focusing on process efficiencies and margin enhancement, including data operations to drive business improvement. Such fund admins are less likely to off-shore personnel as an alternative to efficiency gains and they enhance margins on high volume data-related activities while improving delivery timelines and accuracy.
Harmonate does this through proven automated data extraction from general ledger systems, statements and balances, providing data normalization, creating specialized data warehouses, and intelligently feeding client dashboards, reports and service level agreements. Outputs are also configured for internal general ledger administration, enterprise resource planning and reporting. The data aggregation process encompasses configuration of schedules, data sources, reference data and master data. This provides reporting on expected and actual results to support management through straightforward dashboards.