How Quantiva helped a leading financial services firm automate complex fund document analysis, delivering near-instant comparative insights.
The Challenge
In the specialized world of 12b-1 fee analysis and 15(c) contract renewal support, investors and fund boards need rapid, accurate intelligence to make informed decisions.
A 12b-1 fee is a recurring charge built into a mutual fund’s expenses to cover marketing and distribution, typically ranging from 0.25% to 1% of assets. Under Section 15(c), fund boards must annually review their advisers’ contracts; scrutinizing costs, performance, and services before renewal.
One Quantiva client, a fund analytics provider, helps managers, distributors, and boards compare fees and performance against peers. Their biggest hurdle was scale: during peak filing season, analysts were forced to manually process thousands of prospectuses, SAIs, and annual reports; a task that had become impossible.
Their analysts would spend hours per fund, extracting complex fee tables, performance data, and governance information even as their clients were already participating in board and strategic planning sessions without the benefit of the empowering comparative analysis.
Building an AI That Speaks 'Fund' Language
Fund documents are notoriously inconsistent: fee tables take countless forms, performance metrics rely on different calculations, and governance changes are often buried in boilerplate text.
We developed an AI pipeline specifically trained on thousands of historical fund documents. It learned to extract multi-tier fee structures from any table format, normalize performance data for accurate peer comparisons, identify meaningful changes in investment strategies and board composition, and automatically generate the comparative analytics essential for 15(c) reviews.
The system we built provides what investors and boards actually need: clear visibility into whether a fund's fees are competitive, how performance stacks up against relevant peers, and where potential red flags might exist.
Delivering Intelligence at the Speed of Business
We built a complete platform that lets analysts query documents using natural language, generate board-ready 15(c) comparative reports automatically, create peer group analyses with consistent methodology, and monitor fee trends across the entire fund universe.
For boards evaluating contracts, managers setting pricing, and distributors negotiating 12b-1 arrangements, this meant critical intelligence arrived at the moment of decision; not weeks later.
The Results That Matter
The transformation delivered immediate impact:
- Processing: From hours of manual work to fully automated extraction
- Accuracy: 98% for fee and performance data
- Analyst Productivity: 5x increase
- Throughput: 30% increase in client capacity
Ready for What's Next
The platform adapts continuously, incorporating new SEC requirements, emerging fund structures like ETFs and interval funds, and ESG metrics increasingly important to fund boards. Every document processed further improves the system's ability to surface insights that matter.
Takeaway
In fund distribution and governance, better intelligence means better decisions. By embedding AI into the review process, we turned a compliance burden into a strategic advantage.
At Quantiva, we believe infrastructure should expand markets and create competitive advantages. When you embed intelligence directly into workflows, you enable decisions that weren't possible before.
Ready to accelerate your real-time intelligence operations? Contact Us.
See you next month with more innovations, insights and business technology spotlights in our next edition of the Quantiva Quorum.
