Maximize Your FinTech Stack With These Three Tips

This article was originally published on the Dynamo Blog.

If there’s one topic where assorted investor groups are in lock-step, it’s technology. When?Dynamo surveyed global audiences?of GPs and LPs, they overwhelmingly confirmed that the vast majority – greater than 94% – plan to increase or maintain their technology budgets.

And, it’s no wonder. Investors under pressure to achieve results need competitive advantages beyond instinct and acumen. With better technology, they can greatly increase operational efficiency, gain insights from data, and communicate more effectively.

Finding and implementing a FinTech platform for alternatives investing is an accomplishment in itself – but the results don’t happen automatically. But with the right approach, the technology will soon be working for you, and not the other way around. With software platforms broadly, it’s not uncommon for users to exercise only a handful of features. In alternatives investing, that’s like leaving money on the table.

Here are three ways to start getting more value from your investment in FinTech.

Take Training Seriously

Alternatives investing is a complex and multi-faceted business, and even user-friendly platforms require training to fully understand how to robustly leverage an end-to-end system. The better trained your team, the better your user adoption, data, analytics, and firm-wide efficiency will be.

In our experience, the most well-trained teams have an internal champion whose job duties include understanding the platform and managing the relationship with the FinTech partner. To take this best practice even further, champions can support the development of an internal user guide that outlines a firm’s unique processes, aligning the team around the important “what, when, and how” of using the platform.

You should never feel alone in becoming proficient with your FinTech platform. At Dynamo, a?dedicated client service team?is always available to assist with training and sharing best practices for using the platform features to their best advantage.

Ask: What Else?

If your FinTech platform has extensive capabilities for each stage of the investment process, it’s possible there are helpful features you still have yet to discover. Most users start using the critical features first – but might stop there. Provide your team with regular opportunities to expand their knowledge base and grow their confidence and competence in utilizing the breadth of the system’s functionality. FinTech platforms like Dynamo will continue to add new features that incorporate advancing technology and improve the user experience.

“Our firm has benefitted greatly from taking full advantage of Dynamo’s continuously growing stack, particularly when it comes to data management and insights,” said Bradley Danchuk, director of corporate finance at?Venterra Realty. “The data capabilities continue to become more advanced and flexible, and that’s enabled us to scale and continue to get more from the system. The feedback loop is amazing. We’ve seen our input translated directly into product updates.”

A good FinTech partner will make the process of growing with the platform easy. Dynamo users will find ongoing product education through:

• Product release communications
• Webinars
• Dynamo University?and client events
• Online Dynamo communities
• Client support

Consult the Professionals

Particularly when a new challenge or opportunity arises, it can help to have access to experts who know your FinTech platform intimately and understand quickly how to apply it to your situation. A good FinTech partner will have a wealth of knowledge built from working with thousands of clients, and can equip you with both best practices and novel solutions that help achieve peak performance.

Dynamo clients can directly access our?expert, award-winning support team?through an organized and efficient ticket system that maintains an organized history of your interactions. For quick self-service answers, within the Dynamo platform is a Help section containing user guides, webinars, and articles that put information at your fingertips. For more complex needs, premium support provides dedicated Client Success Managers and technical professionals who meet with you regularly, digging more deeply into solutions for your unique needs.

And now for a final tip. In his experience, Danchuk says a best practice for getting the most out of any FinTech system is a willingness to let go of the way you’ve done things in the past. He believes that at least at first, a key to optimization and efficiency is to tailor your processes to the system instead of trying to tailor the system to your processes. Implementing internal change management and getting buy-in will help your firm quickly maximize out-of-the-box functionality and set you up for future success with custom configurations.