How an Institutional Asset Manager Unified a $2.5 Billion Structured Credit Platform

As the firm expanded across CLOs, CMBS, and investment-grade fixed income, its technology evolved one asset class at a time. A routine concentration review exposed the limits of that approach. Eight weeks later, investment, operations, and compliance teams were working from a single platform.

Asset Management Case Study: At a Glance

The Firm 

An institutional investment manager specializing in structured credit and fixed income strategies for insurance companies, pension funds, endowments, foundations, and family offices. Its investment platform spans private credit, structured credit, and real estate alongside the firm's broader fixed income portfolio.

As assets under management grew, so did the complexity of the technology infrastructure supporting those investments.

When Growth Outpaced the Technology

Like many institutional managers, the firm’s technology evolved incrementally. Its private credit positions were managed in one system, real estate in another system, and structured credit positions jimmy-rigged into a system not designed for structured credit, all the while cash and reconciliation were maintained through linked spreadsheets. Each application supported its own workflow, but questions spanning asset classes required manual exports, reconciliations, and spreadsheet analysis before answers could be produced. 

The Review That Changed the Conversation

During a routine portfolio concentration risk review, the investment team identified an obligor appearing in a CLO collateral pool, behind a CMBS loan, and in a directly held corporate bond. No single system could calculate the firm's total exposure. Operations exported data from four systems, reconciled identifiers, and manually rebuilt the portfolio. Before the review was complete, trustee data had already changed.

The review demonstrated that the firm's operating model could no longer keep pace with the portfolio.

Why the Operating Model Could No Longer Scale

The disconnected environment created bottlenecks in three critical areas:

• Cross-asset visibility. Answering a single cross-asset exposure question required rebuilding the portfolio by hand before analysis could begin, turning a minutes-long request into a full business day.
• Month-end reporting. Reconciling information from multiple systems consumed roughly 40 analyst-hours each month to recreate data the firm already possessed.
• Pre-trade compliance. Manual reviews across separate applications and written investment policies typically added 30 to 45 minutes to each review and increased the risk of human error.

The Search for a Single Source of Truth

The concentration review made the issue glaring: the firm did not have a data problem or a talent problem. It had an infrastructure problem, and adding people to manage the gaps between systems would only increase costs, not solve it.

The firm set out to find a platform that could do what its existing tools could not. The requirements were specific:

• One portfolio, every asset class. Hold CLOs, CMBS, investment-grade credit, private credit, real estate in a single continuously updated view, with compliance and reconciliation built in rather than bolted on.
• Integrates with any data source. Data agnostic. Connect directly to pricing providers, ratings providers, issuer financials. Native integrations with numerous data vendors already (i.e., Bloomberg data license).
• Preserves analyst workflows. Keep the Excel-based models the team had spent years refining, rather than forcing a rebuild.
• Operational in weeks. Go live quickly, not over the six to twelve months a full platform migration typically demands.

Why the Asset Manager Chose Valitana Vantage

Valitana met every requirement. As a platform purpose-built for structured product investors, Vantage offered a single, multi-asset-class system designed around the exact complexity the firm was managing.

• Built for structured credit. Vantage handles CLOs, CMBS, and corporate credit at the portfolio level, not as generic asset tags.
• Real-time, not snapshots. Where legacy systems show the portfolio as of a fixed point in time, Vantage recalculates positions, exposure, and compliance live as the book moves, which is what makes same-day answers possible.
• Transparent, no-code compliance. Investment policies are encoded once in a rules engine that shows exactly why each check passes or fails, without the black-box logic of competing platforms and without developer involvement.
• Configured around the firm. A dedicated client success team adapted the platform to the firm’s existing process and preserved the proprietary models the team had built in Excel, rather than forcing the firm to adapt to the platform.
• Fast to deploy. The team committed to an eight-week implementation, a fraction of a typical migration timeline.

The Implementation

The rollout focused on eliminating the reconciliation between systems, not replacing every application overnight.

• Weeks 1 to 4: Vantage connects to data providers, , custodians, pricing providers, and execution venues into a unified investment model.
• Weeks 1 to 4: The firm's investment policies were encoded in the no-code compliance engine, while at the same time the security master was built and identifiers were pulled in across asset classes, so CLOs, CMBS, and corporate credit could be viewed as one portfolio. 
• Weeks 5 to 6: Automated reconciliation went live, with exceptions surfaced directly to operations. Investment, operations, and compliance teams moved onto the shared platform.

By month two, every team was working from the same continuously updated source of portfolio data.

A Different Way of Working

Investment, operations, and compliance teams no longer maintained separate views of the portfolio. Portfolio managers analyzed current positions, operations generated reports from the same underlying data, and compliance monitored investment policies before and after every trade. Rather than changing how each department worked, the platform aligned them around a common investment data model.

The Results

Cross-Asset Visibility: 1 business day to under 2 minutes
Portfolio managers can evaluate exposure across 42 active CLO positions, CMBS holdings, and investment-grade corporate credit from a single view.

Month-End Reporting: 3 to 4 business days to same-day close
Approximately 40 analyst hours each month previously spent reconciling spreadsheets are now redirected to attribution analysis and exception management.

Pre-Trade Compliance: 30 to 45 minutes to real-time
Investment policies are evaluated automatically before execution and continue monitoring the portfolio after settlement.

Technology Consolidation: 4 systems to 1 unified platform
Investment, operations, and compliance teams now work from a shared source of truth.

What the Firm Can Do Now

The consolidation did more than speed up existing tasks. It changed what the asset manager is able to do:

• Act on current data. Portfolio managers evaluate cross-asset exposure in real time rather than relying on day-old data.
• Test trades before placing them. Using Vantage trade scenarios, portfolio managers model the impact of a hypothetical trade on exposure, compliance, and performance before committing capital, with full visibility into what changes and why.
• Stress the whole book at once. The firm can layer a hypothetical trade with a macro stress scenario simultaneously, answering questions like what happens to the portfolio if a position is added and the market deteriorates.
• Build its own analytics. With user-defined fields and a formula engine that pairs Python flexibility with Excel usability, the team creates custom metrics and ratings without waiting on developers, preserving the analytical edge it built over years.
• Standardize across teams. Dashboards built by one team become shared applications through the Vantage App Store, giving investment, operations, and compliance a common view instead of four separate ones.
• Redirect analyst capacity. Roughly 40 hours a month once spent on reconciliation now go to attribution analysis and exception management.
• Scale without scaling cost. New positions and asset classes are consolidated into a single platform rather than adding another system to reconcile.

Hear From Team

More Than a System. A Partner.

The firm set out to solve a consolidation problem. It wanted four disconnected systems replaced by one, and it wanted the reconciliation between them to disappear. Valitana delivered that in eight weeks.

What the firm gained went further. Vantage gave it a single operating platform where investment, operations, and compliance work from the same continuously updated data, where a trade can be tested before it is placed, where the entire book can be stressed against any market scenario, and where the team builds its own analytics without waiting on developers. The platform consolidated the firm’s technology and expanded its capabilities.

That is the difference Valitana set out to make. Valitana’s client success team worked directly alongside the firm, mapping its existing workflows into the platform, configuring its investment policies and data sources, and staying engaged well beyond go-live as the firm’s needs evolved. For the firm, Vantage has become the platform the firm runs on, backed by a team that helped them get there and stays invested in how they grow.

If your institution is managing structured credit across disconnected systems, Valitana can bring it together. Schedule a demo to see what Vantage can do for your firm.

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