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Connect: the digital governance hub purpose-built for trustees

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Why a platform purpose-built for trustees does what a manager portal, a reporting tool and a trust admin system collectively cannot

4 mins
Topics
Connect & Data Connect Monitor
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Author
tom-wiseman

Tom Wiseman

CEO

Tom is the Chief Executive Officer of Enhance Group overseeing our multi-jurisdictional Monitor and Select solutions from our Jersey headquarters.

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Most trustees access investment information through three or more different systems: the investment manager’s client portal, the trust administration platform, and a reporting tool or spreadsheet that pulls the two together into something the trustee can act on. Each system was designed for a different audience and answers a different question. None was designed to be the trustee’s investment governance hub. This article explains why a platform purpose-built for trustees, with dashboards, workflow tools and a verified data layer, does what fragmented systems collectively cannot, and why Enhance provides it as standard with every Monitor engagement.

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Why fragmented systems do not equal investment governance

A manager portal shows the trustee what one manager is doing with one portfolio. A trust administration platform shows the trustee what the trust is doing across its full asset base, investments, real estate, operating companies, cash. A reporting tool shows the trustee what an internal team has assembled into a digestible format. None of them shows the trustee what they really need: an independent, consolidated, evidenced view of every investment portfolio the trust company is responsible for, mapped to the trustee’s framework, with the action points and audit trail the investment duty requires (see Fiduciary duty and investment oversight).

Connect is purpose-built to be that view. It is a secure online platform designed for trustees, by people who have spent two decades thinking about how the investment duty is discharged in trust companies. Today, more than 7,000 Connect accounts are in active use across the world’s leading trust companies, providing oversight of more than $50bn in assets under reporting.

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The three layers of the Connect platform

01 Dashboards

Interactive, multi-tier, trustee-built

Connect provides three purpose-built dashboards covering the three tiers of investment oversight (see Multi-tier monitoring). The Trustee dashboard serves client-facing trustees managing a defined book of clients: portfolio drift, client suitability flags and action points, all in one place. The Office dashboard serves team leaders, Heads of Trust and Investment Committee members: aggregated client and portfolio data across the office, including actions and exceptions. The Global MI dashboard serves Boards, Compliance and Risk functions: practice-wide management information on assets, managers, mandates and outliers, exportable for regulator and audit submissions. Each dashboard surfaces the same underlying data at the level of detail relevant to the user.

02 Workflow

Action points, reports and audit trail

Inside Connect, every action point identified by Monitor is tracked through its full lifecycle, raised, assigned, responded to, resolved or escalated, with a date- and user-stamped audit trail that updates automatically as the trustee and the manager move the item along. Every review report is generated inside Connect, stored against the portfolio, and auto-saved to the trust company’s document management system where the relevant integration is in place. Standing reports cover the trustee’s usual review needs, and custom reports can be configured by the Governance Team for non-standard requirements. The workflow layer is where the platform stops being a viewer of data and starts being a record of decisions. Every action that touched a portfolio is recoverable, evidencable and exportable.

03 Data

Open architecture, independently verified, exportable

Connect receives data directly from investment counterparties, custodians, banks and investment managers, and independently verifies and standardises holdings and transactions before they reach the trust company. The verification pipeline reconciles the data against reference values, checks consistency across reporting periods, flags missing transactions, identifies corporate actions that the manager has booked late, and standardises the security and currency identifiers so the same holding is recognised across providers. By the time the data reaches the trust company’s accounting system, it has been through the same verification used to support the Monitor review, so there is no separate reconciliation effort for the finance team. The independence matters: bookkeeping data sourced from the same party that produces the performance narrative is bookkeeping data that has not been checked.

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Why Connect comes with Monitor at no additional cost

Enhance prices for outcomes, not features. Connect access, dashboards, workflow tools, review reporting, bookkeeping data and integrations, is included in the fixed Monitor portfolio review and client review fees. There is no separate platform fee, no per-user charge, no module pricing and no charge for adding additional team members from the same trust company. The principle is simple: the platform that discharges the trustee’s investment duty should not be a separate cost line. It should be how the duty is discharged.
Connect is also available with Enhance’s bookkeeping and integration modules at the same zero marginal cost (see Investment bookkeeping and Connect integrations). The platform that produces investment governance is the same platform that automates investment bookkeeping and integrates with the trust admin systems trustees already use. The only limitations of Connect are imposed by the data quality and frequency that investment counterparties are capable of providing. 

Connect at a glance

The numbers below summarise the scale of the platform and the data it carries. Each is updated regularly as the platform grows. Connect today reports on over $50bn in assets under reporting across more than 7,000 accounts, sourcing data from 800+ investment managers and 300+ data feeds covering 25,000+ securities, in service of 100+ trust company clients globally. The breadth of the network is what makes the platform genuinely useful: a single trust company’s portfolios live alongside the same infrastructure that supports the world’s leading trustees.

Metric Scale
Assets under reporting $50bn+
Assets under advice $5bn+
Connect accounts in active use 7,000+
Investment securities tracked 25,000+
Investment managers covered 800+
Investment feeds connected 300+

The bottom line

Investment governance across multiple portfolios, clients and geographies is challenging. Connect makes the process simple by giving you what fragmented systems cannot: a single, independent, evidenced view of every portfolio your trust company is responsible for, in dashboards purpose-built for your actual workflow. Connect is the digital governance hub the trust industry has needed for two decades. It is included as standard in every Monitor engagement, at no additional cost, with the scale, security and data discipline trustees globally rely on.

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