The year ahead promises to be exciting as continued interest in private markets persists and the market uncertainty creates potential for investment opportunity.
“We know there’s going to be continued interest in digital transformation of the private markets ecosystem, in how we’re onboarding funds, how we’re serving investors and how we’re serving dealmaking teams,” comments Ken Bisconti, co-head, Intralinks, “We plan to continue to invest in our ability to serve all of those needs within an integrated suite of capabilities which is also surrounded by first-class, high-quality services.”
He explains how the firm aims to contribute to the growing efficiency of the overall private markets ecosystem. SS&C Intralinks will also take advantage of the insights and the analytics that will, “make us all smarter in the way we conduct business and more competitive in the face of the growing challenges we expect to see throughout the year,” Bisconti outlines.
From its point of view, Intralinks has continued to see increasing demand from investors for enhanced transparency as well as frequency of information access. “This becomes increasingly burdensome for GPs to provide as their businesses and their funds grow,” Bisconti notes, “Therefore, we’re seeing a strong response from professionals now able to use interactive portals as opposed to emailing reporting information. We can also observe increasing competition on the fundraising and marketing side.”
In light of these developments, having efficient use of technology and digital transformation of those processes, continues to be increasingly attractive.
As a firm, SS&C Intralinks is in the fortunate position of being at the centre of the private markets ecosystem – between dealmakers, institutional investors and GPs, as well as accountants, lawyers, other advisors. This means Intralinks is uniquely positioned to understand the unique challenges of fund managers and to assist throughout the entire fund lifecycle with solutions from fundraising, fund reporting, deal execution and portfolio monitoring.
“Intralinks provides all of those capabilities directly and through our parent company, SS&C we can offer outsourced fund administration. We currently enable over 6 million people within our ecosystem; 240,000 LPs and 1500 GP firms regularly use our products,” says Bisconti.
The past year has been an exciting one for Intralinks, buoyed by the significant momentum in the private markets ecosystem. Bisconti highlights: “We have taken advantage of technologies from our broader company, SS&C, in expanding our portfolio. Maybe most notably, we introduced an offering called eInvestor, which allows us to introduce subscription document processing and electronic digitisation of the onboarding process in fundraising. We’ve also been increasing our ability to provide unique data reporting, alongside the documents we provide in our interactive investor portals.”
This has allowed Intralinks to provide more value in software enabled services capabilities that the firm provides the marketplace.
Bisconti anticipates: “This year ahead is one where we expect to see continued interest in the private markets. We expect to invest more in our fundraising and fund reporting capabilities and build out an end-to-end front office suite of capabilities for our alternatives clients. This allows us to bring fundraising, fund reporting, deal execution, portfolio management and investor portals into one integrated set of capabilities.” 
