Start 2026 with Trusted Data: Why Now is the Time to Eliminate the Ops Bottleneck

If you run operations for an alts allocator, you know the truth. The idea is that the front office generates returns, while the back office ensures those returns are realized, reported and repeatable, and that the business can scale. 

That’s not reality. Far too much ops time is absorbed by constant recovery from fragmented, manual processes: navigating fund portals, dealing with broken logins, extracting data from PDFs and emails, and endless renaming, tagging, filing, chasing missing reports. It’s a Sisyphean task to turn unstructured alts information into clean, complete and available data that can be used across the business.

Our Head of Sales, Goran Fattah, regularly talks with leaders on both the investment and ops side of the house. He described their collective problem in a recent interview: “Folks are still struggling with data that isn't trusted.” He links the absence of trusted data directly to “overburdened analysts… and… delayed and impaired investment management decisions.”

The end result is obvious, but it is not inevitable. If your document and data intake isn’t reliable, everything downstream becomes slower, riskier and more expensive. That’s why now, in this budgeting window between today and the New Year, is the right moment to act.

The hidden cost of “waiting until next year”

Delaying this problem doesn’t freeze it in place. It compounds it.

Goran summed up the risk: “Manual work limits decision quality and growth potential.” The manual work itself becomes the constraint, because the volume of documents and reporting demands doesn’t politely pause while ops gets its processes in order.

In a white paper, Fundamatic explores alts industry ops from the inside: analysts spend hours checking portals and email, downloading documents, renaming them to internal conventions, and saving them into systems, often consuming the majority of their working day. One client noted it “wasn’t unusual” for analysts to spend “75–80 percent of their day doing this work.”

That creates two predictable outcomes:

• Data risk increases. Human-powered workflows are naturally error-prone. One ops leader describes documents filed “in the wrong places and therefore not available to investment managers when needed.”
• People risk increases. Ops teams suffer from the burnout and high turnover that is a predictable consequence of repetitive, high-stakes manual work. It’s particularly frustrating for smart, ambitious analysts who were supposedly hired for judgement and growth, not endless intake chores.

Whether you’re trying to scale or just keep up, “manual” doesn’t just mean inefficient. It’s an invisible yet palpable cap on what your alts business potential. 

The budget window matters more than the tech conversation

There’s a lot of noise in the market right now. “AI” is everywhere, and plenty of teams have become skeptical of buzzwords.

Fundamatic’s posture is different. In Goran’s words: “Folks are realizing the value of automation… when used with purpose-built software and industry workflows.”

This is the key: automation isn’t a shiny add-on: it’s infrastructure. And infrastructure decisions are easiest to make when budgets are being finalized.

As Goran frames it: “Between now and the New Year is a key budgeting period for all businesses. It’s the optimal time to lay the groundwork for initiatives that deliver measurable outcomes throughout 2026.”

In other words: if you want a cleaner, faster 2026, you don’t get around to it in next year’s summer break.

What “investing now” actually buys you: trusted data and fewer distractions

Fundamatic’s white paper argues for a focus on fundamentals, anchored in three outcomes:

1. Complete and accurate investment data
2. The removal of daily distractions and less time lost to rote work
3. Automation that increases productivity and frees cognitive capacity for higher-value work

That “fewer distractions” piece isn’t fluffy. The paper describes an “attention economy” problem inside investment institutions: too many channels, too many portals, too much context switching. 

Fundamatic’s answer is Quietware™, software designed to do the critical work quietly, without dragging users into yet another dashboard-centric world.

This is also why Fundamatic is direct about how automation is (and should be) delivered. The paper emphasizes end-to-end automation based purely on technology” with “no hidden human agents.” This is because automation that relies on human intervention is not true automation, and therefore not truly scalable. And it’s because data rights, privacy and the reality of “automation that’s actually outsourcing” have become legitimate concerns.

The measurable impact: time back, consistency up, decisions improved

When automation is real, consistent and scalable outcomes follow.

The white paper cites “90 percent time savings” as typical for automated processing of fund documents and data, with human time focused on exceptions and oversight rather than constant intake grind.

Goran echoes that customer reality, pointing to clients reporting “over 90 percent time savings” alongside “instant onboarding” and “seamless integrations.”

The point isn’t that everyone should chase a vanity metric. It’s that time recovered from intake becomes capacity you can reinvest into controls, better reporting, better service, deeper analysis, and the work your best people were hired to do.

That’s not a tech company’s utopian view of the future. Read the white paper and you’ll discover how ops leaders in real alts firms have used automation to build more productive and satisfied teams. 

Next step: download the white paper

If you’re budgeting for 2026 and you’re serious about operational resilience, trusted data and eliminating the intake bottleneck, the most useful next step is to read Fixing the Fundamentals: How Trusted Data and Fewer Distractions Unlock Productivity and Performance in Alternative Investing.