The Wallace Foundation, headquartered in New York City, is a philanthropic organization created from the estate of Lila and Dewitt Wallace, the husband and wife founders of Reader's Digest. The Foundation currently has several initiatives that focus on two key areas of impact: children's education and the arts. With $1.7B in AUM, the Wallace Foundation has grown to be one of the largest foundations in the country dedicated to these two causes.
Like other philanthropic organizations of similar size, the Wallace Foundation recognized the need for institutionalizing their in-house portfolio management and monitoring to ensure that their investments were effectively supporting the broader mission of the organization.
When Chief Investment Officer Tom Lenehan joined the Foundation in early 2021, he saw that the organization was facing many of the same operational pain points experienced by other institutional investors: a lack of accurate and timely data to inform decision-making, and a lack of visibility across all assets in the portfolio.
The investment team of four had three clear needs for their portfolio solution:
Tom and Kate Schlinke, an investment associate at Wallace Foundation, had both used Solovis at their prior organizations and knew that the platform could deliver on the investment team's needs.
The Solution: Solovis Asset Owner Solutions
Since implementing Solovis, the team at Wallace has found great relief to their operational pain points. Kate, who was hired as the operational expert for the Solovis platform, has seen the radical transformation the platform has facilitated at the Foundation.
In addition to performance reporting, Kate has utilized Solovis to track liquidity across all of their managers, which they were previously unable to do accurately. The team at Wallace continues to use Solovis opportunistically to automate their operational processes.
One of the most impactful additions has been Solovis Analyst Services, which provides clients with an outsourced operational infrastructure to obtain, centralize, and aggregate portfolio data for review and performance analysis. Tom has found great value in the service as it has helped the Wallace Foundation team execute projects that otherwise would not have materialized as efficiently or accurately.
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“When issues come up, we need a trusted group of people to turn to who help us solve the problem .” Tom Lenehan, CIO | The Wallace Foundation |
The operational improvements at Wallace have been matched by the quality of the partnership with Solovis. Any time Kate has a question about functionality or potential enhancements, she receives prompt and thorough responses and a willingness to ensure a solution is found.
Kate has also established a scheduled monthly check-in with the Solovis team to discuss any ongoing initiatives or ad-hoc items that need extra attention. While Tom is not always as "in the weeds" as Kate may be, he also agrees that the relationship between Solovis and the Wallace Foundation has been a key to the success of the organization.
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“We went to the Solovis team and asked about the liquidity for this manager. They reminded us that liquidity was based on receipt days and we were able to confirm that the liquidity terms were actually correct for this manager. This experience gave us confidence that we have correct, insightful, and timely liquidity reporting.” Kate Schlinke, Investment Associate | The Wallace Foundation |
The liquidity reporting experience offers a clear illustration of what that partnership looks like in practice. According to Tom, the liquidity ratio is the lifeblood of the Wallace Foundation. Within one of their liquidity reports, he thought there may have been a discrepancy with one of their managers. The team went to Solovis for answers.
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“We've been using the Solovis plugin which helps us refresh reports every time we want to re-run returns, exposure data, etc. Having that pre-established template has made the whole process so much faster for us. It's so helpful to have our reporting live in the same system.” Kate Schlinke, Investment Associate | The Wallace Foundation |
The reporting itself has also been transformed. The team worked with Solovis to redesign the reports they review each month, with the Solovis team delivering exactly the look and feel they needed.
What's Next
Tom, Kate, and the team are excited to continue their work in the implementation of additional automated modules that will improve their day-to-day workflows. To start, they recently explored adding Solovis Risk.
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“We were thinking about the Risk module so that we can look at risk across our entire portfolio, not just the public managers. We're interested in exploring all the tools that are available in that module.” Kate Schlinke, Investment Associate | The Wallace Foundation |
Kate is also looking forward to furthering her mastery of the system and discovering more ways she can improve their operational processes. Seeing how the Foundation has been able to grow, especially with the use of Solovis Asset Owner Solutions, has Tom feeling proud of the work he and his team have achieved in partnership with Solovis, and he remains excited about what the future holds for the Wallace organization.