AFTAs 2014: Best IT Integration Initiative—Blackstone

Strategic Partners, as it is known, specializes in the niche business of private equity secondary investments and related fund solutions. It has helped institutional investors and other clients manage their illiquid investments by directly buying limited partner (LP) stakes in over 1,800 transactions since 2000, backed by capital commitments in excess of $16 billion.

However, when the firm was sold to Blackstone last year, its software applications had been allowed to become too many and drift, making it difficult to both use and maintain the platform. Meanwhile, a stipulation of the deal was that Strategic Partners would need to move to Blackstone’s IT estate within one year of the acquisition, making this not only a technical challenge for the BX Workflows team, but one they were on the clock to solve as well. The resulting process was a frantic but coolly delivered integration that streamlined Strategic Partners apps into a unified, easily configurable but high-performing interface. Blackstone began the project by assessing Strategic Partners’ current software providers, and made the hard choice to let them go, opting instead for a more customizable solution built in-house—something many firms would shy away from in today’s environment.

The outcome, delivered a month early in July 2014, is a system that tags incoming documents with metadata, before collecting data from financial statements into a central database for analytics and reporting, reconciling capital account statements from underlying investments, and, most importantly, processing cash notices from underlying funds seamlessly within Blackstone’s enterprise treasury management system. Each step of the workflow was built to be auditable at a granular level, and also accounts for the complex business approval processes associated with secondaries investment.

As for the judges’ verdict, the final decision on the project was far simpler: In 2014, it was second to none.

Blackstone taking home the prize in 2014 is a minor coup, given the private equity giant’s comparatively lean technology organization. Yet this year’s winning project—a major workflow transformation undertaken with the acquisition of Strategic Partners Fund Solutions from Credit Suisse in 2013—is a deserving victor at any size.