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Ridgeline sat down with Travis Hanson and Adam Oreglia from Bay Area firm Saratoga Research and Investment Management to learn about their experience since going live on Ridgeline a few months prior.
You’ve been live for two months. What’s been the single biggest change you’ve experienced?
Travis Hanson, CFO: The biggest change for us has been the speed and visibility. It’s just been huge. Everyone now can see the same data in real-time throughout the system. From reporting to trading to client management, everyone’s seeing the same information for any given client at any given time.
That’s something that absolutely didn’t happen in our legacy systems due to seat licenses and system import delays.
What were the biggest pain points were you solving for?
Adam Oreglia, Director of IT and Operations: One of the biggest things that was holding us back was that we had data in different places across multiple systems; just maintaining those various disparate systems as well as a ton of Excel sheets because it was the only tool we had to manipulate data the way we needed to. Moving over to Ridgeline, we were able to eliminate a lot of that. We just have a single system, which has been really beneficial.
How many systems and integrations did you end up moving away from by moving to a single platform?
Travis Hanson: Right out of the gate, we migrated away from four systems and all the integrations between them. We actually have two more critical systems we’re moving away from - that’ll be six total. There’s also a number of minor systems we’re moving away from. I couldn’t even really count how many that totals to.
When you started, did you set out to replace all of your major systems? How did you weigh a decision like that?
Adam Oreglia: We saw a lot of potential value in centralizing all of our data into a single system. Having everything into different systems, it created siloes within the firm with everybody working on different data sets. So we wanted to really bring it all together. It makes our data richer and allows us to coordinate really rapidly.
Now, we can make a change in our portfolio accounting system and it’s immediately reflected for client management, trading, compliance because they’re all one single system. We saw huge value in the speed and transparency of having that consistent data.
Making the decision to pile all of our critical data and operations behind a single vendor on a single platform was definitely not something that we took lightly. We spent time building up that trust that Ridgeline was reliable and scalable and consistent so we could put everything critical in one spot and know it’s going to be there for us.
We have an immense amount of confidence and we’ve been really happy with the way everything’s turned out.
Travis Hanson: Since we started, we always thought, “There’s got to be a better way.” We would do due diligence with other vendors and consistently were seeing just another product with bolt ons. When Ridgeline came to us, we were kind of in disbelief — the more people we met, the more people knew exactly what we were going through and already told us they were working on solving these problems. It’s been a huge joy to work with everybody at Ridgeline both during the due diligence process and now that we’re live — it continues to be a great relationship.
How has having real-time data impacted your firm?
Travis Hanson: It’s been a huge change for us. We didn’t believe that it could happen. Simple things like adding or changing new accounts, it’s lightning quick throughout the system. You just don’t know what it’s going to be like until you get into the system.
How has your cash management process changed?
Travis Hanson: That’s been a big one for us. We created a whole system in our legacy system to invest in money market funds. But because of the lack of the system’s ability to communicate with each other and just the functionality, we were waiting a day or even two to get data into the systems, export into Excel, run a bunch of scripts. And now because of Ridgeline’s ability to handle intraday transactions so easily and quickly, it’s all in one database and we’ve been able to invest excess cash instruments like money market funds in the same day which is a huge win for our clients. These are the kind of new processes that we thought about for years - and now we’re finding, “Wow, we can do this.” Within days of go live we felt confident enough to get it going.
Adam Oreglia: It was apparent that this was something we could do now. There’s also a reduction in risk. We were running 8-9 reports, running background scripts, manually entering into the Excel file - it was this big, long process. There was risk that something could be done incorrectly. And so now it’s all same-day and using tools that a lot of people in our company understand and use daily. It’s much more consistent and reliable.
What does reconciliation look like for you?
Travis Hanson: Reconciliation has come to life in Ridgeline. You have this beautiful dashboard with colors — compared to the dot matrix system that was used before that was black and white. We’ve seen drastic reductions in recon times already and maintained the quality and accuracy. It’s drastically reduced the risk we’re not catching something. We only expect to see additional efficiency gains.
As you find that efficiency, what is your team focused on now?
Adam Oreglia: One of the big things is a reduction in operational overhead. Working through daily tasks used to be a very cumbersome job and took a lot of mental energy. Moving over to Ridgeline has allowed me to put my Director of IT hat on more often and focus on strategy, where can we find more efficiencies, what tools and systems can we roll out that would benefit everybody. This type of thinking was really tough to do when you were constantly tied down in little monotonous tasks. By eliminating a lot of those, it lets us have those higher-level thinking chunks of our day back and lets us do bigger problem solving. Things that really move the needle for the company and our clients.
Travis Hanson: You get bogged down and now you can get above it. I’m writing down new ideas — things that we could do better, different, or are completely new that would’ve been too cumbersome or risky before life in Ridgeline. It’s been pretty amazing
Adam Oreglia: I love the AI capabilities in Ridgeline. It’s really effective. Especially in learning the system and implementation, taking those deep dives, the AI toll empowers me to solve problems myself diving into a new system. Ridgeline is fairly intuitive but it’s so quick to open the AI tool and say Hey Ridgeline assistant I want to do such and such thing and it just gives me an answer.
What’s next for Saratoga and how does Ridgeline help you get there?
Travis Hanson: The fact that we’re moving away from other systems and living almost entirely in Ridgeline, that’s really exciting for us. Just the ability to pull data for clients, service them, sit down with them and show them the latest data we have — that’s really powerful as we try to develop stronger, deeper relationships.
Adam Oreglia: Data transparency and speed — moving on to Ridgeline has opened up a whole new world for us to pull data. We’ve been working a lot in the past on developing our own internal functionalities. AI is a perfect example of something that now we don’t have to do because it’s already there and it’s done better than we could ever have.
Another one is being able to go back to first principles — what do you do and why? Ridgeline gives you all of this power and capability. I think you lose a lot of the value of moving to Ridgeline if you’re just going to pick up your processes and move them to Ridgeline because a lot are going to be redundant and unnecessary. If you think about those first principles it’s amazing how much value you can get out of new tools because it allows you to reengineer your processes to find more value.
We saw a huge shift starting on day one — it was incredible.
Travis Hanson: It’s a risk to do things the way you used to. A few months into our Ridgeline journey, the benefits we’re seeing far outweigh the risks we took on.
