Why Asset Managers Are Increasingly Frustrated with Due Diligence Portals

If you talk to any institutional asset manager about the "Quarter End Crunch," you’ll hear a familiar, exhausted refrain. They aren’t just managing portfolios; they are managing a full-time, high-stakes content and data operation.

For the last few years, the asset management industry’s hopeful answer to this operational bottleneck has been the rise of the "Diligence Portal." Portal platforms seem like a logical solution to the chaos of new RFPs and recurring client and intermediary platform DDQs that tend to often show up during the first month of each new quarter.

But there's a disconnect in the market that’s no longer a secret. While these portals solve a major problem for institutional investors and investment consultants (e.g. the allocators) that issue questionnaires, they create an even bigger headache for the asset managers who are then required to use them.

The Asymmetry of the Portal Model

If you are an investment consultant or an institutional investor, a portal can be a seemingly helpful tool. It allows you to issue a questionnaire once, standardize the format, and track the responses in a neat, centralized dashboard. It is the promise of "a common college app" for the allocator to manage net new RFPs and recurring DDQs.

But if you are an asset manager, you are on the other side of that workflow. You aren’t responding to one investor; you are responding to dozens each quarter, or to hundreds if you are managing $50B+ AUM.

When every consultant and institutional investor picks their own singular portal across many viable portals in the market, the asset manager is left working across not one standard app but across many portals. This isn’t the promise of the common college app, it is arguably the proliferation of centralized marketplaces gone haywire.

Adding insult to injury, asset managers start to all look and sound the same when their answers are centralized, stacked, and ranked by the “AI” on the other side of the equation.

The Fragmentation Tax

We regularly speak and work with managers, many of whom are our clients, that are forced to navigate 4 to 5 different portals simultaneously at quarter end.

Each portal demands its own proprietary workflow, its own specific formatting, and its own manual data entry, often each quarter. Because these platforms don't talk to each other, asset managers are forced to act as "content librarians," constantly updating the same core data across multiple disparate systems.

It is, as many of our asset management clients put it, a "giant time suck." And if you are not responding to an RFP or DDQ published in their portal, you are likely going to struggle answering it in Microsoft Office or in the other portal.

That’s why our Orrigo + Claude + Microsoft Copilot plug-ins for Microsoft Word, Excel, Chrome, and Powerpoint work across formats, and with any portal. They help managers distinguish and differentiate their compliance-approved language and quarterly strategy data.

To summarize, there are three critical risks inherent in the expanding, portal-heavy landscape:

1. Vendor Lock-In: Rarely do asset managers set out to lock into a proprietary portal system that controls their relationship with their own data, and still requires manual data and content re-entry into the other portal systems. But, this is sadly too often the result.

2. Loss of Differentiation: When every manager is tossed into the same portal database, their content often begins to look identical. It is difficult to highlight your unique firm narrative when you are forced into a homogenized template increasingly scored by AI.

3. Data Sovereignty: Asset managers have legitimate concerns about whether their data is truly protected and how it is being utilized. Managers need data pipeline independence, not dependence on a portal that is also promoting services, and the very same data, to the allocators.

Reclaiming Your Workflow

The future of RFP and DDQ automation, 15Cs, Fact Sheets, Finals Presentations and more marketing and client service workflows is not the proliferation of more portals and new portal AI add-on tools. We believe it is the centralization and automation of your own firm's intelligence including your narrative content, your quarterly data, and your singular expertise.

Many firms are now recognizing or experiencing these challenges and shifting away from locking-in to portals (with many quarterly data updates) toward a "Vault-first" strategy. By building an independent, compliance-approved Vault of your own firm language and differentiation combined with your quarterly strategy and performance data, you create a single source of compliance-approved truth. From that central point, you can programmatically push your answers to the portals, and better yet, within formatted Microsoft Word and Excel documents as well as Microsoft Powerpoint presentations.

If you are a marketer or client service manager that finds yourself spending more time managing portals than you do engaging with clients and managing capital, you aren't alone. But the solution isn't to get better at using the portals—it’s to take control of your data and content pipeline so that the portals eventually become just another channel for your distribution, similar to the consultant database vendors you already work with.