Designing a Scalable IR Tech Stack: What Fund Managers Need to Know

Designing an investor experience technology stack sounds daunting. Where should fund managers start?

Jen Jackson, Alpha Alternatives: “Having thoughtful discussions and alignment across the organization on what you are trying to achieve is key to success. Develop a ‘north star’ statement: a single sentence that describes your ideal investor experience. Socialize it and gather feedback across the impacted stakeholder groups including Fundraising, Investor Relations, Legal, Compliance, Tax, Accounting/Finance. Ensuring everyone is aligned to the vision at the outset will be key when it comes time to more detailed design discussions.

Once you have defined your north star and set clear goals and objectives, you need to understand the current state of your investor experience and determine how far off from your ideal future state you are. It can feel tedious, but documenting the current state ensures you have an accurate baseline to use when defining your roadmap on how to get to the future state.”

Dave Gilligan, Atominvest: “I completely agree, Jen. Creating a roadmap is an important step where you begin to transition from the theoretical to the tangible. The first step should be to prioritize the projects that will bring you to your future state. This should be done purely from the perspective of ‘what’s most important to the business’ and should not be influenced by factors like resourcing, budget, etc. Only once you have a pure prioritization of initiatives should you look to sequence them in a roadmap. This is when you would then introduce cost, budget, resourcing, and other factors into the equation. By understanding what’s most important to the business first, you can then use that information to properly sequence the work which will likely include making business decisions on how to allocate resources, budget, etc.”

How should fund managers think about designing their investor experience when they potentially have a variety of LP personas to service?

Dave: “One of the golden rules of sales is to ‘know your customers’. This idiom holds true for GPs, and I don’t mean from a compliance & regulatory perspective. GPs work very hard to understand their client’s needs, and this should show through in how they design their investor experience.

Traditionally, LPs fit into two buckets: institutional or individual. More recently, retail and wealth clients have made a push into private markets, which leaves GPs with an increasingly complex matrix of LP types to manage. By knowing their clients and their preferences for receiving and digesting information, GPs can provide an experience that feels customized to their needs.”

Jen: “This is an important consideration when designing your investor experience because it will inform you of the level of flexibility your technology solutions require. For example, your institutional clients may not care about flashy data visualizations and dashboards, they just need a data extract that they can easily feed into their own system that aggregates their investment data across their portfolio. Designing an experience that is curated based on an individual investor’s profile will require identifying tools that allow for a high degree of flexibility.”

These days everyone wants their technology to be flexible to meet their needs without tons of customization. How do you define flexibility in software terms?

Dave: “Flexibility = time. To understand how flexible a platform is, you need to know the difference between configuration and customization. Configuration is the ability to implement or update a platform with little to no development effort. This means the platform has been designed such that a majority of use cases can be solved for out-of-the-box. Customization, on the other hand, means a platform has been designed in a way that solves for a certain set of use cases and anything outside of that usually requires additional coding.”

Jen: “It’s not uncommon for a software provider to overstate the flexibility of their solution, and when you get down to the nuts and bolts, their solution relies heavily on custom development instead of configurability, which can be slow and costly. Designing an investor experience built on flexible tools means less time spent addressing gaps in the platform and on implementation.”

Dave: “Flexibility can mean time savings for LPs, too. Tools that can offer self-service functionality that is configurable to the unique workflows of a GP can make the LPs life easier by allowing them to manage contact updates, wire instruction changes, transfers, etc. from a single interface.”

Change is hard, and GPs are sometimes reluctant to introduce new systems or processes to their investors. How should this be factored into your investor experience design?

Jen: “Future-proofing your technology stack is really important. Switching costs can be high for investor-facing technologies, both from a dollars & cents and relationship cost perspective. LPs don’t want a constantly changing experience that requires them to keep up with a revolving door of solutions. Continuity and consistency are key.”

Dave: “I think the platform needs to be built (and priced) to scale with your company. Often, this can mean identifying vendors that can meet your long-term needs, but one that you wish to grow into over time by taking a phased approach to adoption. Understanding pricing models is equally important. Make sure you have a good grasp on what the 3, 5, or 10 year pricing model looks like based on projections in your firms growth.”

Jen: “I would add getting an understanding of how the product and engineering teams operate. This will give you an informative view of the firm’s potential longevity and future market presence. Naturally, you want to choose a solution provider whose platform is built on modern technology such as open API frameworks and cloud-based hosting. More important, though, is really understanding how they operate. What does their software development life cycle look like? How often do they push code changes to Production? How is client feedback factored into their product? What does their product roadmap look like? Firms that can move quickly, are frequently improving their products, and building features alongside their clients are typically the ones that have the most flexible tools and the one that will have the most longevity.”

Cost is usually a big factor in these types of design decisions. Beyond the typical cost considerations, what are some less obvious things to consider related to cost?

Jen: “Firms should understand their ability to allocate technology costs to their funds. Often, LPAs will have specific language about what is and is not a chargeable fund expense. The ability to pass through the cost of investor experience technology to the funds will make the internal spend approval much easier. It’s also important to identify technology providers that offer modular solutions and flexible licensing models such that it’s easy to identify and allocate fund expenditures.”

Dave: “I’ve seen an uptick in firms looking to investor experience technology solutions to create ‘operational alpha.’ Finding the right platform that can create tangible current and future cost savings is now becoming part of the technology solution evaluation process. This could mean the ability to scale AUM without increasing headcount, reducing service provider costs through more efficient and transparent processes, or software licensing savings by simplifying the IR technology stack. Going back to what Jen said at the beginning, this is another reason why the planning phase is so important. Having a clear understanding of your firm’s current state processes and the inefficiencies and pain points within them will allow you to quantify the operational alpha you can create.”

Some firms are opting to build their own investor experience technology instead of buying something ‘off the shelf’. What advice would you give firms embarking on a build vs buy decision?

Jen: “When deciding between Build and Buy, firms should objectively assess their capabilities, priorities, and long-term goals. Build can be the right choice for organizations with deep technical expertise, the capacity to dedicate significant resources, and unique, fast-evolving requirements that demand heavy customization.

That said, building means taking full ownership — from development to ongoing maintenance, feature updates, and support. You’ll need to keep pace with industry trends to avoid falling behind. It’s a long-term commitment, not a one-time project. Buying, on the other hand, can offer faster deployment, predictable costs, and access to continuous innovation from vendors who are solely focused on improving their products. For many, this allows internal teams to stay focused on core business goals rather than becoming software maintainers.

There’s no one-size-fits-all — the right path depends on your needs and how much you’re willing to take on.”

Dave: “Another key consideration when deciding whether to build or buy is resourcing. Does your firm have strong internal IT and development resources that you can dedicate to this endeavor? Do they have the capacity to take this on, or should you look to an implementation partner to take on the responsibility?”

Jen: “That’s true, Dave. I would add to the list having a clear understanding of the costs associated with both the build and the buy option should be a priority. It is not uncommon for a build process to take longer and be more expensive than you expected. More variables and unknowns when starting from scratch naturally increase the likelihood of things being missed that result in cost overruns. Firms should also ensure that they budget recurring annual costs for the product ownership associated with the build options, which is often overlooked. The buy option, on the other hand, offers a more predictable cost model as you have essentially outsource the product ownership to the vendor.”

This is all great advice. Any final thoughts to share?

Jen: “Designing your ideal investor experience technology stack can feel overwhelming for some firms. Finding a trusted partner who has gone through this before to guide you through this journey will help ease the burden. Specifically, you want to look for firms with deep industry experience across advisory, selection, and implementation.”

Dave: “I would close by saying don’t wait to get started. The industry and technology supporting it is constantly evolving, and fund managers are keenly focused on improving this area of their business. Keeping up with your peers means starting these conversations now.”