How automation transformed a manual reporting process into a scalable digital client experience
A leading London-based active investment manager, growing rapidly through organic expansion and planning further acquisitions, came to Instinct to automate and digitise its client reporting.
Its new management team wanted a modern digital presence, including a new website and a better investor experience. It quickly became clear that delivering this required changes to the reporting infrastructure behind it.
Fund reporting draws on data, operations, regulation and client relations. Information must be accurate, current and consistent wherever investors encounter it: in a factsheet, on a website, in a client report or through another digital channel.
The firm’s existing processes were highly manual. Data came from multiple sources, passed through numerous systems and required significant human intervention before reaching investors. As funds, share classes, jurisdictions, documents and digital touchpoints multiplied, complexity compounded. Those processes became harder to scale, more expensive to run and more difficult to control.
Delivering a modern website and fully automated factsheet production required a single, governed reporting infrastructure connecting the firm’s source data to every downstream client output.
Instinct delivered it in just three months.
The Problem: Scaling Reporting Without Scaling the Operation
The immediate challenge was factsheet production. Data was being assembled from multiple sources, passed through manual processes, and then formatted into non-standardised templates. It was resource-intensive, difficult to scale, and created an unnecessary scope for inconsistency and error.
Sub-optimal factsheet production was really only the visible end of the problem.
To improve what investors saw downstream, the firm first needed to improve how its reporting data was managed upstream. That meant creating a controlled workflow through which data could be ingested, validated, governed, and then used repeatedly across different client outputs.
Fix the Data Flow Once, Improve Every Output
The Instinct platform provides the infrastructure between the firm’s source systems and its client-facing reporting.
Rather than separately assembling data for each factsheet or digital output, fund information is brought into a single governed reporting layer. From there, it is validated, managed, and consistently disseminated, dramatically improving the economics of the process. Instead of repeatedly finding, checking and formatting the same information downstream, the firm now master's it upstream and deterministically disseminates it to every output automatically.
A Slick Fund Centre
This same infrastructure now powers the Fund Centre within the redesigned website where investors now have a single, intuitive place to find current fund information, performance data, and documentation. The client dramatically transformed their website, and Instinct powers their Fact Centre (injected via URL) drawing upon a much better controlled data process.
Digital Factsheets at Scale
This same principle applies to factsheet delivery.
A unified framework brings consistency to branding, structure and information while the flexibility required across different funds and products is retained.
Once the underlying data and rules were in place, much of the repetitive work involved in producing factsheets was automated. Human intervention moved away from assembling and checking routine outputs and towards managing genuine exceptions and work requiring judgement.
Crucially for the future; adding more funds, sharing classes and documents no longer requires more operational resources.
The Result
In three months, the firm moved from a heavily manual reporting process to an automated infrastructure capable of supporting the delivery of its new digital experience and digital factsheet production. The Fund Centre and factsheets are the visible outputs, but the real magic sits upstream on the platform; a governed workflow connecting source data to the client.
If you want slick, scalable reporting downstream, you first have to get the data and workflow right upstream.
