Concertiv Case Study: Market Data, Travel and Technology

Global Investment Advisor Centralizes Procurement Strategy, Saving $800K in Just Three Years

Key Takeaways:

• A global investment advisor was facing 12%+ annual cost increases and struggling with the administrative burden of managing more than 40 vendors across multiple departments and geographically dispersed offices
• Concertiv implemented its Procurement-as-a-Service solution to reduce spend, optimize the procurement process, and save the client valuable time  
• Through these initiatives, the firm is realizing ongoing operational efficiencies, freeing up time and resources to focus on more critical priorities

Overview

A leading investment advisor had been growing rapidly since 2015. With a global footprint and offices in Connecticut, London, and Dublin, the firm focuses on investments in a broad range of credit and hard asset classes.

As the firm grew, so did its needs for outside vendor services. Without a centralized procurement function, each department and office were responsible for its own selection and management of vendors. While this was manageable at first, the firm quickly found this approach led to inefficiencies as the organization scaled. With no clear assignment of responsibility for spend management and vendor negotiation, unused subscriptions and licenses were automatically renewed at higher prices each year. Multiple contracts were signed with the same vendors across US and UK offices, each being managed separately. While the CFO suspected the firm was overpaying its vendors, he lacked the market intelligence and peer benchmarking to prove this. Furthermore, the firm’s relatively small spend did not provide for leverage in negotiations.  

Facing escalating costs, increasing administrative complexity, and minimal leverage in their buyer negotiations, leadership decided to outsource their procurement strategy. The firm went in search of domain experts who focus exclusively on their key spend categories, efficiently manage their vendors, minimize administrative burdens, and aggressively negotiate on their behalf to obtain the best possible prices and terms with their vendors.

Corporate Travel

With over 70 employees across 3 offices and a client base that spanned the globe, the expense and administration of corporate travel proved to be a major pain point for the firm. With each department and office handling its own travel, the firm had little control over and insight into their travel expense. Concertiv began by analyzing the firm’s current travel spend and footprint, identifying the most frequently visited cities and flown routes. By leveraging the Concertiv Global Hotel Program, the firm provided its employees access to an exclusive portfolio of more than 25,000 pre-vetted, premium properties, securing the most competitive room rates available. This initiative not only elevates the travel experience but also harnesses the power of discount programs to slash hotel and airfare expenses by upwards of 18%. To help facilitate the administration of corporate travel and ensure that the global investment advisor would obtain these savings, Concertiv lead an RFP process to find and onboard a travel agent that could grow with the firm and maximize utilization of available discounted rates.

Price Reductions and Operational Wins Expand the Relationship to Market Data and Tech

‍A year into the partnership, the global investment advisor was pleased with the savings and administrative gain Concertiv was delivering. Seeking to replicate this success elsewhere, the firm turned to Concertiv for help with their Market Data and Technology procurement.

Market Data:

Facing price escalations, upcoming contract renewal negotiations, and new procurement needs, the firm’s Market Data team turned to Concertiv to analyze existing spend, deliver savings, and provide expert recommendations for new products and vendors. Launching into the new partnership, Concertiv’s Market Data experts began a thorough due diligence process, ultimately centralizing all 35+ market data contracts into the Concertiv360 platform. At the request of the CEO, Concertiv planned and executed a comprehensive vendor negotiation process, leveraging benchmark data and aggregated buying power to secure better terms at a lower cost. Concertiv was able to negotiate a lower price for 85%+ of the contracts, providing over $150k in annual savings.

Technology:

As the global investment advisor scaled, so did the complexity of managing their expanding technology footprint. The firm had contracted with a Managed Service Provider but was unsatisfied with the service they were receiving and turned to Concertiv for help. Leveraging deep-industry expertise and peer benchmarking data, Concertiv was able to negotiate improved service level agreement terms while driving over $100k in annual cost savings within the MSP contract alone.

As the firm’s portfolio of technology solutions expanded, so did the burden of administration. Each new hire necessitated the creation of dozens of user accounts, each with their own position and department-specific requirements. The team was spending a considerable amount of time on new hire user provisioning and entitlements workflows, with a similar effort required to deprovision departing employees and interns. Concertiv was able to take on the bulk of the provisioning and entitlement work, reducing the time spent by the support teams. Over two years, Concertiv completed hundreds of provisioning and entitlement tasks and assisted in the employee onboarding and offboarding processes, saving the company hundreds of hours.

Better Service, Operational Efficiencies, and Nearly $1M in Savings – All in just Three Years

Concertiv’s relationship with the investment advisor grew based on shared goals and vision, with Concertiv delivering over $800K in cost savings and hundreds of hours of saved time throughout the first three years of the relationship. The additional operational support has also been well received by the support teams in Finance, Legal and Compliance, who are now free to focus on their most critical priorities. Leveraging Concertiv’s procurement platform, the team today enjoys on-demand access to procurement assistance for the host of vendor categories covered by the relationship, in addition to ad-hoc value-adds such as deal related work.

‍Interested in learning more about procurement-as-a-service for your firm?  

Learn how leading firms are partnering with Concertiv to reduce spend, minimize risk, and save time across key spend categories.