Company
Aumni, a JP Morgan Company
My role
Research, Strategy, Prototyping, Testing, Product Design
Team
1 Product Designer (me),
1 Product Manager,
5 Engineers,
1 Engineering Manager,
2 Subject Matter Experts
Challenge
Aumni specializes in summarizing key data from legal documents. To start this project, I leveraged our in-house experts and mapped out the most important fund documents. Our team decided to focus on Limited Partnership Agreement (LPA). This document outlines the key economic and legal terms of a fund. It can be as long as 300 pages and full legal reviews of LPAs are expensive.
What are the current challenges Limited Partners face when investing in a fund?
I collaborated with our Product Manager to conduct user interviews to understand the challenges investors face when evaluating fund investments.
Documenting agreed terms is time-consuming, especially when working on summaries to understand past decisions and their impact on the portfolio.
Investors have limited access to market benchmarks, which would be helpful to know when negotiating terms.
Full legal reviews are expensive.
Organizing deal documents can get messy and could be automated.
Strategy
Help investors prepare for negotiations and support key workflows
Our vision focused on supporting diligence workflows, helping Limited Partners evaluate fund investments. To help our users prepare for negotiations, I also designed features that compare key economic and legal terms to market. Once an investment is made, all of the documents and summarized data will be accessible in Portfolio. Together with a Product Manger we set up weekly calls with our customers, to help us dive deeper into use cases and test initial ideas before each release.
Seamless integration of new and existing features
Limited Partners can invest both into funds and directly into companies. Any new features had to work with all types of investments and be consistent with the existing design system. After reviewing Aumni’s information architecture, I mapped out a dedicated space in Portfolio for Fund Investments and added a new area called Diligence (focused on fund evaluation pre-investment). Separating existing and potential future investments created a structure that was easy to navigate for our new users.
Key Features
Speed up Fund Reviews
In the new Diligence area, users can now submit fund review requests and access all past reviews. Once a request is submitted, all of the data will be summarized, and users can review the most important fund terms to decide whether to invest and/or negotiate.
Dive deeper into complex terms
Fund terms can be complex and do not always follow the same structure. I designed two ways to help users review a data point in more detail. Users are able to access a detailed summary of the most complex part of the fund agreement: management fees and distribution waterfall. To dive deeper into any other data point, users can click on section references and view the specific paragraph of the document that the data point was sourced from.
Compare economic and legal terms to market and portfolio
Fund investors often do not have a way to compare key terms to market data. Creating a way to learn what’s market and quickly prepare for negotiations, was one of the most important features of this solution. I designed a separate area in the Analytics part of the app, with a comparison between market and portfolio terms. Analytics helps fund investors gain an understanding of typical terms in market and portfolio. When evaluating a specific fund, users can leverage the Fund Analysis tool, which includes a quick comparison of key terms to market data.
Outcomes
At the end of this project, our team has delivered new functionality making it possible for Limited Partners to leverage Aumni. According to the Private Equity International LP Perspective study from 2022, 64% of LP’s say Fund Due Diligence is the most time-consuming task in their day-to-day work. Monitoring the usage of the new features, I noticed users switch between the overview and our Analytics and Fund Analysis tools when evaluating a Fund Investment. Portfolio and Diligence were the most used sections of the platform by Limited Partners, their time split evenly between existing and potential investments. If I had more time on this project, I would explore different ways of supporting the diligence workflow that facilitate a faster comparison between market and portfolio data.
