Why fee billing personalisation & automation matter | Gresham

​Every asset manager knows how important positive experiences and interactions are to attract and retain clients. Personalisation is key to meeting specific preferences and requirements. In the world of fee billing, how do you tailor deliverables for each client when every investment management agreement (IMA) is different?

If you have hundreds of individual and family portfolios to manage, automation is the only way to personalise at scale. But not all automation is the same. Here are a few key ways to deliver the best fee billing investor experience possible.

​IMA customisation

Institutional sales teams must be able to process customised IMAs and fee rate changes as a key part of negotiating and winning new business. By applying unique settings per account, automation can provide a systematic billing workflow that offers flexibility and remove constraints from sales teams.

Automated invoice personalisation

Invoices should allow for dynamic fee structures and flexible formatting at the summary and detail level for both family and individual accounts, using parameters such as wire payment type, average market values, FX rates, and others. Firms or their clients may also require custodian-audited market values aligned with their fees, as well as a clear and concise breakdown of the client’s fee.

The ability to add account-specific subsections via tailored sets of details and display options can go a long way to present information that is most important to the client. Creating global defaults for each family saves time while preserving the ability to personalise settings for individuals. Standard, out-of-the-box invoices also offer greater consistency with the flexibility to adjust formats and content to satisfy specific client requirements.

Customising distribution

Typically, invoices are sent to clients via email with an attached pdf. Customised email messages using data tags and distribution parameters from the firm’s fee billing system can give invoices a personal touch while ensuring timely and secure delivery.

Firms should also be able to track and differentiate information displayed on invoices depending on the party receiving it. For example, the person actually paying the invoice may want to see more detail or different data points than an interested party who just wants to receive a copy providing summary-level information.

Dynamic investor communications

Invoices are not only client-facing and directly represent your firm; they are also living, structured documents that should be able to adapt to changes in the way you do business and what your clients expect from you.

With technology and data driving many of our processes today, personalisation of invoices and other account-level communication and reporting becomes more seamless and flexible, without appearing to be automated. A billing, invoicing and receivables process should be efficient, secure and error-free – and completely customisable and auditable.


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