Getting More With Your Alts Data: How Canoe’s Email Notifications for Data Extracts Enable Cross-Functional Teams

For today’s investors, data drives decision-making. However, the process of extracting, managing, and delivering relevant information to where it needs to be often poses significant challenges to alternative investment firms and their downstream partners. As new data sources are explored, new reporting systems are adopted, and new partners are integrated, there is an increasing need for solutions to enhance data accessibility and transparency. That’s why when Canoe clients tell us what they need, we provide flexible solutions to better help scale their businesses. 

Answering the Demand for Data Alerts

The task of collecting accurate and up-to-date data is often an uphill battle for alternative investment operations teams. The manual tracking method, characterized by persistent follow-ups and inconsistent updates, can be defined by its operational inefficiencies, siloed data, and lack of transparency. In response, software vendors have begun to offer data alerts. 

While these vendors may show off sleek, visually appealing alerts, how do their notifications hold up when supporting a more operationally efficient workflow? Users may find that these scheduled alert emails look nice and arrive on time, but also that they fall short in critical areas, lacking the flexibility, detail, and security measures required to make them useful. They often are too rigid to show exactly what clients want to see.

Canoe takes a different approach – overcoming these limitations by introducing dynamic scheduled extract functionality that sends an alert according to your preset cadence whenever new data is available, powering myriad workflows and use cases. 

Elevating Alerts with Canoe: Scheduled Data Extract Emails

Our newly launched Email Notifications for Data Extracts feature aims to transform how alternative investors manage and utilize their data. Scheduled extracts can be tailored to include the data points that are relevant to the client’s specific needs, and to the client’s delivery preferences – whether that be on an hourly basis or monthly, first thing in the morning or at the end of the day, or any time in between. With Canoe’s market-leading position across all types of alternative investors, this enhanced flexibility in available delivery methods offers our clients another competitive advantage over other solutions with more rigid alerts. Additionally, Canoe’s document receipt and scheduled extract alerts contain secure, direct links to the underlying documents and data extracts, respectively, thus setting a new standard for this type of functionality in the industry. 

The Email Notifications for Data Extracts functionality, while simple to set up, can service a broad range of practical needs. For example:

• You may want a daily digest of upcoming calls and distributions, alongside due dates and relevant bank account details. 
• You’re interested in receiving a monthly performance report on all the funds in your portfolio on the first of the month. 
• You want to keep track of important data points, like holdings reports, net returns from performance estimates, or even your K-1 information during tax season.

Empowering Client Teams with Greater Flexibility

Our decision to create the Email Notifications for Data Extracts functionality was driven by the need to provide our alternative investor clients with unparalleled access to their data. That flexibility shines through as users are able to specify the exact data points they want to receive—and also when and on what basis—to better power downstream teams and systems. The customization here allows operations managers and fund administrators alike to tailor their data delivery precisely to their requirements, ultimately empowering more informed decision-making and optimized business processes.

Canoe’s scheduled extract functionality expands upon our earlier release for clients leveraging secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) and file transfer protocol secure (FTPS) to now also support email notifications. This expansion is particularly helpful for users who don’t use SFTP and expands the delivery methods available to suit the needs of different users. Whereas the use case for SFTP is typically to automate the sending of data and documents to a downstream system, email notifications for scheduled extracts may be more useful for the users themselves—alerting them when there are new documents and data and actually generating the extract with the documents that drive that data attached (if they so choose).

Conclusion

From treasury management and tax preparation to cash management, bank detail fraud detection, bank exposure analysis, and more, this new functionality supports more use cases than traditional email alerting tools and opens up a multitude of potential operational applications. Canoe’s scheduled extract functionality, along with the myriad alerting and delivery options, empowers front and back office teams to navigate the complex landscape of alternative investments with confidence and agility. 

Interested in learning more about this new functionality? Speak to an Expert