On the 30th of January, EY Luxembourg invited its Alternative Investment Funds (AIF) Club members to discuss the impact of digitalization and robotics in the alternative investment value chain and highlighted key areas to focus on and how to get started with the own digital journey on basis of three selected technologies: Robotics Process Automation (RPA), Data Analytics and Customer Portal.
Not the most tech innovative sector–but with large potential
Given this is a sector with manual heavy processes with little to no automation, being very spreadsheet dominant and thus, cost and labor intensive, it is not surprising that the transformation to a more efficient, transparent and structured business environment is desired. The big plus of this sector is its richness in available data. The opportunity lays in a holistic solution of, not only collecting, but also analyzing and reporting data in order to support and deliver proactive and predictive management support and decision making. On the customer side, it is challenging to ensure a consistent experience due to decentralized teams and reporting, where only a few synergies are leveraged and knowledge mainly sits with individuals. Providing clients a front-end self-helping portal to access information reports, statuses and billing information can ease the pain. Despite the lack of maturity in the adaption of advanced technologies, this sector, however, is not averse to digital advancements as examples, as rising discussions around Smart Buildings as well as tenant facing customer portals indicate.
The PERE Value Chain and its digital opportunities: Robotics Process Automation (RPA)
Within the Private Equity and Real Estate Value Chain, implementation of robots can provide great value in areas of the value chain that have labor intensive, highly repetitive, rules-based tasks with high error potential. Through the assignment of robots, not only can an error reduction within former manual tasks be seen, but also a shift of human capital to more value-added and judgment-based functions that will increase production and retention rate. Typical key areas are within Fund Inception (prospecting and contact management, investor set-up AML/KYC), Tax (filing, compute and prepare VAT/tax returns), Asset Management (portfolio reporting, risk management and asset level reporting), and finally within the areas of Finance (especially across bookkeeping, fund accounting, consolidation and financial statements, fees/expense reports and regulatory reporting), which entail a lot of high volume, low complexity business processes which can be standardized and automated.
Robotics is one of the digital technologies that will slowly but surely become an important process driver across all players of the PERE sector and will unlock long existent pain points.
How to get started
EY Luxembourg is happy to share more insights on this topic and to discuss further on how to get started by introducing digital technologies to your business and processes.
Contact
Michael Hornsby, EMEIA Real Estate Funds Leader, AIF Club Chairman
Ajay Bali, Director, Digital and Analytics
Aylin Mutter, Assistant Director, Digital
35E Avenue John F. Kennedy L-1855 Luxembourg
Tel. : +352 42 124 1
