Dynamo Software
Comprehensive Alternative Asset Management Platform

The alternative investment industry today is developing at a steadfast rate, creating the need in organizations running or investing in alternative, privately structured investments to scale and seamlessly manage their business. Rising to the occasion to drive such scale is Dynamo Software. The company, for over two decades, has been providing data driven, configurable asset management, and reporting software purpose built for the alternative investment industry. Dynamo’s clients include private equity and venture capital funds, real estate investment firms, hedge funds, funds of funds, prime brokers, foundations, endowments, pension funds, and family offices. The company is helping their clients improve the productivity across the front offices of fundraising, deal management, research and due diligence; as well as the middle and back office functions of investor servicing, portfolio monitoring, valuations, investor accounting, and compliance. Dynamo solves these challenges across the alternative investment landscape including general partners (GPs), limited partners (LPs), and service providers. One of their flagship offerings, Dynamo Investor Portal has created a wave of transformation in the alternative investment industry. It is a configurable online hub that provides the investors secure access to individual investment data, fund performance, and account services. The icing on the cake is the portal’s integration with the Dynamo CRM that helps clients leverage their portfolio and investor account data to deliver customized and ILPA-compliant reporting to further improve investor communications and automate the workflows of the deal management and accounting teams.

Following are the insights shared by Steve Tobio, Director of Product Management and Robert Goldbaum, VP of Strategy about their company’s unique services in the portal software space.

Could you provide some information about your companywith a focus on portal software landscape?

Goldbaum: Beginning in 1998, when Dynamo Software started, it quickly grew from pure CRM features and added edits portal offering as another form of investor communication and to facilitate a more interactive client experience where fund managers could avoid repetitive calls to their potentially hundreds of investors by simply posting information that gets in front of the typical questions they ask. Dynamo understands the importance of the relationships between fund managers (GPs) and their investors (LPs), not only from their two decades of innovating efficient investor communications, but also from having a significant LP client base that uses Dynamo to manage the intake of such communications, data and reporting. In contrast to many of our competitors, we have it all on one platform allowing a bi-directional flow of information spanning investor account details as well as portfolio data if desired.

To stay ahead of the curve, we have a very large development team, a very consistent product, and a nice mix between GPs and LPs helping us constantly improve the system and foster efficiencies across the private investment industry. Today, we serve more than 500 global clients that represent over $3 trillion in client assets under management (AUM).

What pain points does your clients face today when it comes to the portal software space and how do you resolve them?

Goldbaum: Our clients primarily face three pain points. Firstly, there is the challenge of capital raising and marketing themselves. The second core challenge hits when servicing the investor is required by reporting their individual transactions, valuations, and fund level information as well as signing documents and making updates to communications preferences. Lastly, protecting sensitive information can be a challenge if they are not using institutional strength infrastructure for their portal and CRM systems.

Unlike those firms that rely solely on fund administrator portals, Dynamo provides client branded investor portals for fundraising & marketing and investor relations & servicing. The Dynamo Fundraising Portal, integrated with the Dynamo CRM and Investor Servicing platform hosts all of the clients’ marketing collateral, as well as in-page data and charts. The platform has all of its communications and records in a single system enabling portal users to conveniently view updated account, deal, fund, and firm level data and documents. For instance, real estate and private equity managers can show pictures of properties or portfolio company information along with granular data that people want to convey about transactions, capital calls, distributions, and valuations as download-ready data.

We have been working for many years on giving more self-service options to the investor—setting passwords, uploading documents, compliance affirmations, changing wiring instructions, e-signature/DocuSign integration, and more with all the appropriate approvals built into the integrated CRM.

What features of Dynamo’s platform differentiate it from its competitors in the market?

Tobio: We have significant integration capabilities with business intelligence (BI) and visualization tools, whereby we can enable highly configurable charts and graphs on the portal for clients to use. Also, instead of having to print and mail all documents away for physical signature, our DocuSign integration saves a lot of headaches for both investors and fund managers.

Investors today are looking for more interactivity and more than just a document repository and managers would like to know more about what their clients want on their site. Our system allows clients to track when the client logged in, when they opened a file, what was downloaded, and how many times they viewed it. Even from a servicing perspective, our system lowers the fund manager’s manual support effort and lets the investor make change requests on their own, funnelling them into a manager’s approval process directly in Dynamo CRM’s investor services workflows.

What do you envision as the next big step that your company will be taking?

Tobio: User experience is very important for us. We have an in-house UI team that is completely dedicated to the investor portal. We value the feedback we get from hundreds of our clients and believe that as the industry evolves and as portals evolve, clients need to keep up and make sure that their web environment is modern according to market demand. Our next 12-month investment is heavily focused on the UX and UI.

Goldbaum: Since being backed by Francisco Partners in 2017, we have acquired synergistic businesses that expand our platform, going deeper into the front and back office needs of the private investment industry. Most recently we acquired Preqin Solutions, the software arm of the well-known data business, Preqin Ltd, giving us essential tools for monitoring a private asset portfolio and normalizing financial statements and valuation models. We have also been expanding our staff’s geographic footprint with staff across the U.S., London, Europe, and Asia.