TECHWORK 23: Simon Munday, Bregal Investments

Experience
Munday has 20 years of experience as a technical business analyst. In 2003 he started his career as a systems operator at Time Inc. After four years he moved to Augentius Fund Administration, where he worked for almost eleven years as a business analyst team manager, responsible for managing 13 staff across five locations. Following a brief stint as business analyst at Dolfin Group, he moved to Bregal Investments in 2019.

As a professional, Munday bridges the gap between people and technology. He worked at Private Capital Suite (FKA Investran) for 15 years eliciting requirements, querying data, building reports, automating processes, and visualising data.

Achievements
One of the first tasks of his tenure was to get Bregal’s client portal up and running and implement a new fund accounting solution.

The firm elicited requirements and appraised various solutions before landing on Private Capital Suite, a product that suits the GP’s needs. Additionally, the firm houses a small collective of former fund admin colleagues, people who have strong system knowledge which is incredibly helpful.

Reporting was recreated from scratch, fully automated and streamlined. Munday tries to build the reports in a way that allows them to be managed within the finance teams, only adding VBA code where necessary, instead of leveraging things like Power Query in Excel to automate steps which previously had to be done in code.

One of the main challenges before he joined was effective use of an old legacy system which made obtaining data difficult, required manual workarounds and was not fit for purpose.

Bregal is currently working on an upgrade to Private Capital Suite live. The use of a web based connector on local machines means that the team will use Excel 365 and leverage all of the fantastic new functions which come with it.

Further, the firm is looking for a way in which its investors can ask questions based on their data, better self service of data and less reliance on ad hoc reports.

Data Visualization via tableau is very much at the forefront of Munday’s mind and a work in progress, to enable self-service for commonly asked questions. Additionally, he is striving to enable users to ask questions of their data rather than asking teams.

Finally, a banking system implementation which links bank accounts is on the list. Munday deems treasury management extremely important, even more so after the recent issues with SVB.

Bregal’s tech stack includes Office 365, Tableau and Private Capital Suite.

After more than 10 years at Augentius, Munday has former colleagues dotted around in-house and at fund admins across London. They have a few different WhatsApp groups to try and stay connected as much as possible.