How to Improve Transparency and Trust for Portfolio Management Leaders

As heads of portfolio management teams, you are pivotal figures in renewable energy finance. You oversee teams of portfolio managers to maximize portfolio performance and coordinate origination, underwriting, risk, compliance, and reporting teams to hit fund-wide goals. But portfolio management leaders’ work is made harder by inefficient internal systems that require manual updates and lead to fragmented workflows. Legacy systems limit transparency into portfolio managers’ daily tasks.

But there is a better way. Digital transformation not only makes portfolio management more efficient—it also benefits team leaders through better transparency into their direct reports’ work.

How inefficient systems undermine transparency

Even as the technologies and economics of renewable energy are improving day by day, the tools used in project finance are still stuck in the past. Banyan Infrastructure’s Project Finance Software Industry Report reveals that 60% of respondents who use software to manage deals and portfolios only use Microsoft and/or Google Suites.

These methods require countless hours of data gathering, sorting, and organizing. They also severely limit the transparency into the daily workflows of portfolio managers internally. Opaque systems create added difficulty for portfolio managers who are not only interested in improving their fund’s performance but also in growing their direct reports’ professional skills.

This leads to spending hours on frequent check-ins, preparing for status meetings, manual portfolio reports, and chasing missing data across teams, forcing portfolio managers to exceed the 40-hour work week just to keep up with administrative legwork. These are hours and dollars not spent on evaluating new deals and improving portfolio strategy and client relationships.

Using portfolio management systems to improve people management

Consider a digital platform that’s tailor-made for project finance. A project finance platform can address inefficiencies and a lack of transparency that plague most portfolio management teams. These tools are a game-changer for teams accustomed to spreadsheets and emails because they provide a single source of truth for all project- and deal-related data, allow real-time performance updates, and automated reporting.

Having a purpose-built project finance software tool accessible to all team members reduces the need for managers and employees to constantly share files, grant access to projects, and provide context. Instead, leaders have full oversight into employee work, keeping everyone informed of ongoing progress, making manager-employee communications seamless, and setting portfolios up for future securitization.

A cutting-edge project finance platform also provides a single source of truth for all data related to renewable energy projects and deals. Its integrations pull data from disparate sources (e.g., accounting software, CRMs, bank accounts, and more) into one platform for easy access, improving transparency and cross-team collaboration.

Achieving better outcomes with internal tools

With a project finance tool, colleagues of all seniority levels are empowered to collaborate with ease. Teams save time by leveraging custom-made tools, templates, and automations that enhance efficiency, transparency, deal velocity, and profitability. Not only does this enhance internal workflow, but it also ultimately boosts returns by streamlining portfolio management.  

Are you ready to improve your team’s transparency and efficiency? Get in touch with Banyan Infrastructure to request a demo of the all-in-one project finance software.