August 06, 2021
Let me paint you a picture I’m sure you’ve seen before: you’re sitting at your desk trying to look for updates on public pension funds. You’ve come across a few, but one needs an RFP that is due in three days, and another you’ve found no longer has accurate contact information.
Essentially, you’re stumped — but you’re not the only investment sales professional who feels this way.
Let me paint you another, much prettier, picture: you’re sitting at your desk, scrolling through new updates on institutional investment mandates with ease, and one catches your eye. As you click on this new mandate, you see the public pension fund’s consultants, RFPs, recent commitments, an asset allocation update, and so much more. All in one place.
At Dakota, we know the frustration of gathering institutional investment mandates only to learn that it’s outdated. We’ve raised over $40B since 2006 through investment sales and supplying firms through our data platform.
To avoid this frustration and improve efficiency for your team, we’ve created Dakota Searches: a free email subscription service that offers real-time alerts for new institutional investment mandates as they happen.
In this article we’re going to touch on the importance of public pension funds and how critical it is to know about mandates. After reading through this, you’ll have a deeper knowledge on the two problems we’ve been able to solve with Dakota Searches.
Public pension funds are a very large source of capital for private equity, private credit, private real estate, private infrastructure, equities, and fixed income mandates.
There are over 400 different public pension funds, RFPs, and mandates being announced on a weekly basis. Naturally, it becomes a tall task to try and track all this information by yourself as an investment sales professional.
Having a service to help identify these searches is almost table stakes. The opportunity cost of $10M, $50M, $100M or more is extreme in terms of fees that your firm would earn.
As an investment sales professional, you’re asked to deliver a lot in a short amount of time, such as building a pipeline. If you’re relying on internal staff to gather mandates that are performed by public pension funds, it’s extremely difficult.
It’s critical that you at least know about and are able to participate in any mandates that are announced. You’ll want to know about foundations, endowments, corporate pension funds, and know the other institutional investors, specifically the general consultant and field consultant.
It’s also crucial you receive timely updates because by the time a public pension posts a mandate, it can be a matter of time before an RFP is due.
Now we’ll give light to the two issues we’ve been able to fix with Dakota Searches.
With over 400 searches being performed by public pension funds, it’s extremely difficult to rely on internal staff to keep track of these. To provide an efficient alternative solution, we have a dedicated team who combs through over 200 different sources. They look through the monthly investment committee meeting notes to find these mandates for our product.
We created a mechanism that allows subscribers to choose which asset classes they would like to receive mandates in, as well as deliver them on an automated basis. The mandates are posted within Dakota Marketplace and are automatically distributed to subscribers for that asset class.
To receive real-time updates for new institutional investment mandates, sign up for Dakota Searches! Just enter your name, email, and select the asset classes you want alerts for, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Morgan Holycross is a Marketing Manager at Dakota.
