March 30th saw the first of what we hope will become a regular part of our calendar, the Kurtosys Client Day. At Kurtosys we value trust, transparency and internal and external teamwork. The last two years have seen many changes for all of us, a positive has been the quality of work life balance with the more mainstream acceptance of hybrid working models across asset management.
On the flip side, this has impeded on our ability to create new partnerships with our clients and to operate truly as a part of their team. While the bonds with our long-term clients remain, we’ve had new team members (myself included) and changes in teams. This has created the need to develop new relationships and strengthen old ones with many of our clients.
A little insight into the day
So, what happened at the Client Day? Well, as part of our approach to product development and servicing the asset management industry, we are focused on building for a community of users. As a result, we wanted the focus of the day to be about multi directional honest and open communication, for us to talk to our clients, for them to talk to us and perhaps most importantly, for them to talk to each other (believe it or not, you are all trying to solve the same problem 😊). So, we (hope) we deviated from a day of PowerPoint monotony, in favour of a day of shorter 25 – 30-minute presentations followed by 45-minute table discussions for attendees to discuss the topics and debate solutions amongst peers, the end goal to be to start to build a community.
The day was kicked off with our new CEO Lee Godfrey introducing the Kurtosys executive team and talking about our 2022 focus of stabilising the foundational elements to allow longer term scalable and sustainable acceleration of our product development for our clients as a community.
Second to the stage was our Global Head of Product and Sales, Patrick McKenna. Patrick brought to life our product and platform development roadmap for our clients, addressing some key features that may have not been utilised by all clients such as “Healthcheck”.
Pat was then able to cover another key release for us our “Studio” suite of tools that utilise popular platforms (MS Word, PowerPoint, and InDesign, with Excel coming soon) and clients fund data to create seamless fund data experiences and put publishing content back in the hands of the clients.
Partnerships are an integral part of our strategy moving forward and next to present was the first of our external speakers. François-Kim Huge, Partner at Deloitte Luxembourg was able to present to the room some of the key impacts of regulations on fund distribution processes. François has a wealth of expertise in this area and starting off with a thorough review of the timeline of upcoming regulations. With real life examples (ESMA) and suggested frameworks for lifecycle management of documentation, the room had plenty to discuss.
Closing thoughts from François came in the shape of some insights looking ahead to mass customization, rethinking technology infrastructure and how innovation / re-engineering can benefit organizations.
After a well-earned lunch break it was the turn of the client experience team led by myself, we ran through the findings of our initial client satisfaction study / monitoring, covering client success, support, our platform and project delivery alongside enablement and training, then ultimately the overall experience of working with Kurtosys. There were some key themes and areas of significant opportunity which again supports our focus on building for a community to solve common problems.
The following session was then a live poll of those in the room, key questions around Kurtosys, our performance and areas for development were covered and recorded.
The final presentation of the day was from our long-term partner Rich Watts from Gravity Global. Rich focused on how Asset Managers can create a better digital brand experience and operating model by embedding an Enterprise Design System (EDS).
Rich covered the foundational principles, brought to life with some real work global case studies, then went on the guidelines for successful application, closing with guiding principles and takeaways around operating models
Summary
This event was just the start, we are committed to building lasting and valuable partnerships with our clients that will empower them to create best in class investor communications and reporting solutions.
We are already planning a series of smaller, more focused workshops that will be solutions oriented and aimed at tackling specific use cases and challenges we know multiple clients experience.
We are focused on stabilizing our relationships and our platform to allow scalable and sustainable growth of those partnerships.
For any further discussions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
