Southern Cross Group Modernizes Investor Communication Processes with Intralinks

Southern Cross Group is a private equity firm founded in 1998 with offices throughout Latin America. The firm specializes in buyouts, turnarounds, middle market and early stage investments, and has invested in different industries such as energy, food distribution, manufacturing, services, logistics, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, technology, telecommunications, retail, education and environmental sectors.

“We use Intralinks as a replacement for a platform developed ad hoc several years ago. Intralinks allows us to have a complex platform in features but simple in terms of usability. The processes of publication of information have been optimized considerably since we began the use of Intralinks for managing controls and reducing manual tasks. And Intralinks guarantees the ultimate in cybersecurity for us.”

— Andres Jacob, chief technology officer, Southern Cross Group

Situation

Southern Cross Group was operating with an outdated, overly complex ad hoc investor communications and reporting platform that required a high degree of manual effort to manage and maintain, according to the current industry data processing and management standards. In addition, the previous solution was having trouble keeping up with constantly evolving cybersecurity requirements.

Solution

After reviewing available options, Southern Cross group decided to implement Intralinks for Alternative Investments to manage its investor communication and reporting processes.

Southern Cross Group was already familiar with Intralinks financial technology capabilities, having used Intralinks’ virtual data rooms in its M&A business processes like deal sourcing and marketing, deal preparation and management, and due diligence and post-merger integration.

For fund management, the firm was impressed with Intralinks’ complete, one-stop solution for private equity communications, fund reporting and investor relations.

In making his decision, Andres Jacob, Southern Cross Group’s CTO, felt confident that Intralinks’ decades of experience would provide the security tools to enable clients to meet global data sovereignty and security requirements, and comfortable with the solution’s ease-of-use and global familiarity. “We had a very high acceptance by users and investors,” said Andres, “And very few problems during and after the implementation.”

Benefits

Southern Cross Group found that Intralinks helped streamline investor communication processes across their fund with a flexible and scalable data management and reporting framework.

The firm increased efficiencies dramatically by leveraging Intralinks’ fast bulk-uploading and file-naming features, robust access controls, and audit-ready recordkeeping.

An unexpected benefit came when using Intralinks for Investor Reporting. Intralinks Filesplit automates the splitting of a single fund document into multiple, investor-specific tax statements – saving time and resources that used to be wasted on manually preparing investor statements, and virtually eliminating errors. Southern Cross Group uses Intralinks Filesplit to increase the speed, accuracy and security of investor reporting.

Looking ahead, Andres Jacob and team expect to further integrate the Intralinks platform tools into their business operations. “We will continue to promote the use of the tool, seeking to take advantage of features not yet implemented – for example, Intralinks advanced information rights management (IRM).” Intralinks IRM adds an extra level of security by allowing users to control and revoke document rights, even after documents have been shared and downloaded.

Andres concludes, “We imagine using Intralinks as the only communication tool with the world of investors.”