CAM Capital needed a faster, less cumbersome way to analyze and report on their complex investment portfolio and ownership structure that exceeded simple Excel functionality. Addepar empowered the firm with a platform to customize and create reports on-the-fly with accuracy and without outside support. Now CAM is able to achieve deeper investment insight and greater impact on their portfolio.
CAM Capital is a private investment company based in New York City. CAM was founded in 2012 by Bruce Kovner following his retirement from Caxton Associates, the macro hedge fund he founded and managed from 1983 to 2011. CAM manages capital exclusively for entities related to Mr. Kovner and its senior employees, and engages in both direct investing as well as manager selection across a wide variety of asset classes.
CAM initially used Excel for much of its data aggregation, analysis and reporting, which proved too cumbersome for customization and speed. For the firm’s Chairman and its Chief Investment Officer, Excel simply wasn’t enough. With the help of Yuriy Shteinbuk, a member of the investment team, and accounting manager Amy Rupinski, the Company looked for other alternatives.
Quickly customizing reports was an especially convoluted process; altering a single number caused a chain reaction of addendums spanning multiple reports. “It became incredibly difficult. You could see loops of five to ten different worksheets linked to each other. So for a minor change, you could be modifying multiple Excel spreadsheets, which could easily lead to large mistakes,” Mr. Shteinbuk says.
Drilling into the data to find specific information proved even more time-consuming. Both the accounting and investment teams were feeling this pain. “We get a lot of requests for different subsets of data,” Ms. Rupinski adds. “In Excel, that’s very difficult if you’re tracking everything on an entity level.”
“The reports were static. To see any updates, we’d have to ask Amy’s team to make changes to a bunch of spreadsheets, which you can imagine is extremely complicated and convoluted when you have many nested entities,” Mr. Shteinbuk explains. “The process of getting answers became time-consuming and messy.”
Yuriy Shteinbuk"Addepar removed the massive challenges we faced before."
To find the right solution that addressed the intricacies of both the accounting and investment teams’ requirements, CAM underwent an extensive search. “It was pretty clear that Excel wasn’t a long term answer,” Mr. Shteinbuk says. “As a first cut, we explored 20-plus different platforms. We narrowed down the offerings and took a serious look at six providers. The ultimate factor that differentiated Addepar was the customization of the solution.”
The pair found that Addepar empowered CAM to construct and adjust reports in seconds – a process that with many competitors required either a programmer on staff or a third party to manually create a new template at an additional fee. Addepar gave the firm the autonomy to execute these changes with unprecedented speed. “When we report for a huge, confluent discussion, we need to be able to do it ourselves, and Addepar removed the massive challenges we faced before. We can now run a performance report across any entity, make templates for efficiency, or customize an ad hoc report whenever we want — it’s very easy. It makes analytics so much faster, more reliable and simple.”
Yuriy Shteinbuk"The ability to customize in Addepar is unique. It was a differentiating factor for us."
CAM noted the depth and robustness of Addepar’s reporting as impressive, allowing flexibility that the competition has yet to match on the most basic level. “The ability to customize in Addepar is unique. It was a differentiating factor for us,” Mr. Shteinbuk says. “You can pop open a blank canvas and drag a pie chart or apply a filter to a portfolio table — you can do all kinds of things. If you want to build a report in a competing software, you have to email them and say ‘can you build me this?’ You then have to wait potentially days or weeks for the turnaround and have to pay an additional fee. The customized reporting tools Addepar gives to its clients are much more sophisticated, and I think Addepar has a big edge on that.”
After onboarding, CAM quickly realized that Addepar’s benefits extended beyond just increased efficiency. “From an investment perspective, Addepar delivers accuracy, accessibility and reliability — those factors are just as important as time” says Mr. Shteinbuk. “It’s hard to quantify how much time we’ve saved because we’re able to do more with this system than we would have even been able to do without it on an analytics basis. So you’re comparing apples to oranges. We’re just better equipped than we ever were before.”
Yuriy Shteinbuk"Addepar succeeds its competitors in customization, reporting, speed, accuracy, and flexibility across all asset classes."
The platform has improved the way CAM functions on a day-to-day basis. “I can customize a report on the fly, cut it or filter it any way I want and there’s no delay. Before, Amy’s team was quick, but it still took a couple of hours to refresh that data, and you’re just that much more hesitant to ask questions, knowing that answers could take a few hours for the team to pull together. Addepar succeeds its competitors in customization, reporting, speed, accuracy, and flexibility across all asset classes,” Mr. Shteinbuk says.
If CAM needs additional help to discover or implement new features of the software, they turn to Addepar’s hands-on client solutions team, which Mr. Shteinbuk and Ms. Rupinski cite as integral to extracting the most value from the platform. “It’s not like we call a general line,” Mr. Shteinbuk says. “We have a go-to team who we also meet with in person. They understand our portfolio and know exactly what’s going on. And if there’s an issue, we don’t have to take an hour to explain the problem — they can efficiently help us troubleshoot. It’s powerful to have that, and it’s not the standard.”