A college endowment was managed by an outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO), but the College decided to set up its own internal investment office.

In order to migrate all operational functions to an internal team, the CIO had to hire operations staff as well as put into place technology, service providers, and processes. The insourcing of all operational functions had to be completed in an efficient manner so that the College would not be covering the cost of an OCIO in addition to the cost of an internal operational environment.

The CIO hired UPC to start the operational setup while the search for the Director of Operations was underway.

UPC designed an end-to-end investment operations environment for the newly formed investment office which allowed the investment office to insource all operational functions within 15 months after UPC was hired.

UPC collaborated with the CIO on the selection and implementation of an Investment Book of Record (IBOR) to support investment accounting, portfolio management, and reporting. This involved issuing a RFP, diligence meetings, and evaluating multiple vendors. The implementation then included migration and reconciliation of 20+ years of data across 350+ funds as well as system configuration and user training. Investment committee reporting would be generated through data extracts from the IBOR and RMS platforms.

In addition, UPC worked closely with the CIO on the selection and implementation of a Research Management System (RMS) to support contact management, document management, manager pipeline, and other research workflows. The implementation included migration of all manager and vendor contacts, subset of historical documents, and the setup of research workflows. In addition, UPC implemented content collection and data extraction tools offered by the RMS vendor to improve the efficiency and accuracy of document management and investment accounting.

UPC also selected and implemented an exposure/transparency data service provider which included reviewing the first period’s data for each fund subscribed and submitting feedback to the vendor.

While the vendor selection was underway, UPC reviewed and cleansed all data that would be imported into both platforms, helping to reduce the length of the implementations of the RMS and IBOR platforms to 9 months.

UPC partnered with the CIO to onboard and train the new Director of Operations.

While additional operations staff were recruited, UPC worked with the Director of Operations to provide temporary operational capacity by overseeing the maintenance of the newly formed IBOR including document management, shadow accounting and monthly close processes.

After the Director of Operations and the Operations Analyst were onboarded, UPC helped guide the CIO on additional training needs for the operations team.