Research management systems have for too long been the application in the corner of the buy-side front office that overpromises and underdelivers.

Investment management professionals understand the need for a system and a process to help manage their investment research operations, but what most have used to date are applications that are antiquated, slow, and inefficient. Instead of helping their investment team do more of what works, traditional systems require a lot of extra steps that don't contribute to the bottom line —driving higher investment returns.

Investment organizations devote significant resources modernizing the way firms interact with markets, counterparties, regulators and investors. Yet, when it comes to the systems supporting teams charged with finding the right investment ideas—the very lifeblood of the active manager—many organizations continue to rely to technology that is outdated, hard to use and can’t support the way analysts and portfolio managers want to work.

Why not fix a system and process that’s so clearly broken? Especially when migrating to a platform that makes it easy to capture and share investment research in real time is simple and straightforward.

When we’ve posed this question to prospects, they’re response falls into one of three buckets. The most common response we get, however, is usually something along these lines: “Could we do better? Probably so. Will it be worth the hassle? Probably not.”

Unfortunately, due to previous experiences with painful system changes, and a general feeling of being underwhelmed by older research management software, some organizations assume switching to a new platform will be more trouble than it’s worth. They think the process will be difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming.

This misconception is costing their investment teams hundreds of hours in wasted effort and lost productivity. It leads to morale-lowering frustrations among analysts as they spend far too much time searching for research they’ve produced but can’t easily find, or worse, spend hours uploading research content into an outdate system instead of spending that time on uncovering new insights. Ultimately, these efficiencies can prevent or delay the team’s best ideas from getting into the portfolio.

Wasted effort comes in all shapes and sizes, but every version of carries its own cost on individual, team and organizational productivity and profitability.

The hour Cecile just wasted trying to find a key piece of research that she should’ve been able to find in seconds?  The great investment opportunity Vladimir just missed because there was one small, but critical contribution that never quite made it to his desk? Or how about all the intellectual capital developed on company time that walks out the door with Judy when she leaves for a new firm?

All of those are examples of wasted effort that is 100 percent avoidable with the right system and process in place. With the right system and process in place it’s not only possible to eliminate wasted effort, it’s easy to eliminate it while also protect your firm’s most valuable asset — your best investment ideas.

For the CIOs, portfolio managers, and investment operations and technology teams that see the opportunity to improve the research process but aren’t sure the change will be “worth the hassle,” we’ve seen them quickly change their thinking when they see how easy it is to migrate to Mackey.

The reality is that change doesn’t have to be painful. Our team is battle-tested, having migrated leading investment managers from legacy research management platforms, other modern providers, internally built systems, Outlook, SharePoint, shared drives, Evernote, Lotus Notes, OneNote, and a wide variety of other third-party applications.

We’ve handled small migrations and tackled major cutovers with hundreds of users and terabytes of data. Whether you're sitting on decades of investment research or just getting started, and no matter current system (or lack of one), odds are we've already helped one of your peers implement a system that eliminates wasted efforts and helps them to more of what they do best — find good investment ideas.

We’ve perfected the research content migration process into nine simple steps that can have your team up and running on a modern, SaaS-based, work-from-anywhere platform in just a few weeks. Migrating customers need only to take the first step and send a single communication requesting their data from their current systems provider, whether external or internal.

We handle the rest. No more hassle, no more wasted effort, just you and your team doing more of what works best for you and your clients.‍

Get the Mackey Research Content Migration Process Document Now.‍