How SCS Financial is leveraging AI to grow its $42B business
AUM
$42 Billion
Headquarters
Boston, MA
Number of Offices
11
Advisors
80+
Prospect Documents
2,000+ per year
Types of Documents
Bank Statements, Portfolio Reviews, Balance Sheets, Private Investment Documents
Overview
Founded in 2002, SCS Financial is a pioneer in delivering sophisticated wealth management solutions to ultra-high-net-worth clients. In addition to serving complex, multi-generational families, including entrepreneurs, business leaders, athletes and entertainers, SCS also works directly with institutional investors in an OCIO capacity. The firm’s unique philosophy focuses on building a holistic understanding of a client’s balance sheet, from a high-level breakdown of asset allocation to a detailed mapping of each individual investment. This approach allows SCS to build a clear picture of each client’s net worth and identify opportunities to deploy tailored solutions across public and private markets. As a result, having accurate and comprehensive data is critical for advisors to make thoughtful recommendations and showcase the value of the firm.
The Challenge
In order for SCS to conduct proposals for prospects or existing clients with held away assets, the firm leverages a central team with over 30 investment professionals. As part of its due diligence, SCS receives a complete set of financial documents, including brokerage statements, alternative investment files, portfolio reviews, and balance sheets. File formats can vary widely across PDFs, faxes, scans, screenshots, and Excel files.
Time consuming manual data entry
Prior to Powder, the central team would manually transpose these statements into Excel, which for a given client could range from 100 to 1,000 pages of investment data. This exercise required 2-4 people to copy and paste holding information from documents, review and fix errors, and map the data to the firm’s required formats.
A week long bottleneck
The overall process required the team to focus almost exclusively on data entry for up to a week depending on the complexity. This created a significant delay and longer turnaround times, as no financial analysis could begin until the necessary data was in a clean, usable format.
With Powder, SCS Financial has seen:
95%
Reduction in Manual Data Entry
3 Hours
Time Savings per Statement
80%
Faster Turnaround Times to Clients
2x
Number of Prospects Served
The Results
By partnering with Powder, SCS sought a solution that would alleviate time-consuming tasks, automate error prone manual data extraction, and produce accurate, reliable results. Most importantly, SCS wanted a platform that would highlight the firm’s sophisticated approach to wealth management and showcase its emphasis on technology and innovation.
Automated data extraction across different file types
Instead of multiple investment professionals spending hours across dozens of statements, one person simply drops all files into Powder to produce a complete breakdown of a client’s accounts, investments, and asset classifications. With such a significant focus on alternative investments, SCS can not only extract details on marketable securities, but also all relevant data points for private investments, as Powder also parses total commitments, distributions, contributions, unfunded commitments, and vintage years.
Seamless transition into portfolio analysis
Holdings data is then mapped automatically to SCS’s ideal structure so the investment team is equipped with all necessary information to conduct bespoke analysis for each client. The entire process is now completed within a few days of receiving the files, as opposed to a week later previously. As a result, Powder has allowed SCS to focus on what matters most and has enabled the firm to serve more clients with the same number of resources.
"Our business model at SCS is predicated on providing white-glove service to the ultra-high-net-worth and family office community. Powder has been instrumental in helping us deliver on this commitment by enabling our people to work more efficiently and focus on delivering comprehensive and insightful investment analysis to enhance our client experience.”
Chief Operating Officer
