When life gives you cinnamon sticks, make a moscow mule and garnish it with one, or at least that’s what Trevor would do! 🍹
Covid-19 is far from cinnamon sticks but it did change our world as we knew it and we all had to adapt to the new reality, quickly. Starting 2020 in lockdown, we all thought (or hoped) life would go back to normal by fall. For FundApps, this meant we could continue our annual tradition of bringing our North American clients together for a day of learning, sharing, and celebrating. Little did we know that the pandemic was not going to go away anytime soon. The realization started to set in mid-summer when we would normally begin planning our annual conference.
It quickly became clear that we were not going to host any events in person - we would not put our clients at risk nor our teams. This meant we had to get creative and find another way. After 2 months of planning, things finally came together for our very first virtual conference! 🙌
Team Updates
2020 has been a crazy year for regulators and filers alike. Our content team have been kept busy: from ESMA requiring everyone to report on lower thresholds in the EU SSR which was deployed within 24 hours, to enhanced transparency in Italy for SMEs. I don’t know how anyone could manage such coverage without an automated solution.
Since the beginning, FundApps’ vision has been to help clients automate all things compliance. More recently, this has led to new partnership initiatives. Chris, our Head of Partnerships, has been working on partnerships with other vendors to fill in any gaps - our new Corporate Actions module is a recent result of this.
This year’s client conference was special for many reasons. One of them happened to be FundApps’ 10th Anniversary. September 17th, 2010 was the year FundApps Ltd was hatched with the goal of transforming the financial services industry and taking asset managers out of the dinosaur age into the modern day compliance nirvana. FundApps has seen tremendous growth throughout the years thanks to the commitment and dedication of our teams, and our clients. 💪
Thud Graph Workshop
No conference is complete without engaging your clients and giving them an opportunity to provide feedback. Thanks to our product team - shout out to Jonny, Aga, and Carol - this was made possible through creating a workshop called Thud graph. So, what is a thud graph? 🤔
A thud graph is a way of tracking impact to improve features. The goal is to map features on a graph to determine if they are bringing value to clients, or if they are lacking, aka thud.
Our product team selected a list of features for the thud workshop. They then designed a live survey to gather feedback, in real-time, supplemented by an open discussion to better understand the underlying drivers of such feedback.
Here is an example of our Data Overrides feature mapped on a Thud Graph
In this example, our feature received an average score of 6.5 which brings it to the good category and away from being a thud. More importantly, it demonstrates how useful this feature is. This can help us make better informed decisions when it comes to further developing the feature to bring it up into the awesome category.
The open discussion made it possible for us to gather additional feedback and explain the ratings by clients. This particular feature was made valuable through having the additional links and shortcuts in the UI. This type of information is important in determining how clients realize the value from the usage.
No features were voted into the Thud category. This shows that our development team is moving in the right direction. If any features had ended up in Thud it would not have necessarily been a bad thing. Instead it would have simply served as an indicator that the feature may not be the best area for the product team to invest in.
Fun Updates
It wouldn’t be a proper FundApps conference without some fun! 🎊
For starters, my colleague Mitch hosted an awesome Draw Trevor (our company mascot) competition. All of our clients got a chance to showcase their inner artist to bring to life WFH Trevor!
The winner was voted by the Client Services team. It was a tough selection but stood out by creativity and drawing quality. The client drawing was then transformed by our design team, Aga and Bav into a real Trevor. The winner of the WFH Trevor is… 🥁
We are grateful for all the clients who showed up and actively participated in our virtual conference. We hope 2021 will bring more in person interactions!
Want to join the FundApps Compliance Community and attend awesome events like these? Get in touch!
