CLIENT

Covenant Review

INDUSTRY

Other

CORE TECHNOLOGIES

Java
MS SQL
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BACKGROUND

Our client wanted a web portal to deliver investment advisories y reports to subscribers -mostly investment management companies

Covenant Review emerged in 2006 as the first research firm to focus solely on bond and loan covenants. It provides valuable information to sophisticated investment firms about their rights as bondholders, after carrying out independent research on corporate bond terms for hedge funds, mutual funds and other investment vehicles.

After working as an investment banker for many years, the business’s founder recognized a niche gap in the market that Covenant Review could fill. When an investment firm is researching bonds which provide the most favorable market position, it must pay a lawyer to review and advise them on a 300-page ‘prospectus’ document; an essential but incredibly expensive part of advising on investments.

Covenant Review employs in-house lawyers with an investment banking background to review each prospectus, and investment analysts who summarize the lawyers’ findings into four-to-six-page legal briefs. Our client allows investment management companies to access these easily digestible reports through a subscription service, giving them legal advice in a cost-effective manner. It was looking to deliver this service via a custom web portal, which it needed external support to create.

CHALLENGE

To build a feature-laden web portal with customer actions audit trail

To make its clients’ legal brief subscriptions more easily accessible, Covenant Review wanted to build a bespoke web portal with a number of specific features. Our client wanted this portal to have:

  • Powerful search capabilities and indexed bond information, allowing users to find what they needed from a library of thousands of documents in seconds.
  • Clearly defined user permissions to allow users to access features that were appropriate for their role.
  • Integrated email marketing automation, which would send newsletters to clients as soon as new reports were published without any manual intervention.
  • Automated report generation capabilities, allowing data to be turned into professional, customer-facing reports at the click of a button.
  • Audit trailing so our client could understand customer actions, identify upsell opportunities and make ongoing improvements to the user experience.

Following his initial conversations with Asahi Technologies, Covenant Review’s founder, Adam Cohen, immediately decided we had the ability to deliver the right software solution.

 

SOLUTION

A scalable custom web portal with searchable indexed numerical and textual databases for quick access to information on bonds

Our team first translated our client’s requirements into a clear blueprint, which formed the foundation of a scalable custom web portal. It had indexed, searchable databased and printer-friendly report layouts, allowing subscribers to easily access and understand key information.

We used a .Net 4.0 framework to build and deploy Covenant Review’s custom web application. Over the course of our work, our skilled team:

  • Designed a Microsoft SQL server database that had optimal indexing, allowing clients to quickly get results from advanced searches.
  • Created 25 user permission categories and assigned password-protected accounts to employees, ensuring only a ‘super admin’ could granularly define user access based on their roles.
  • Integrated a third-party tool that allowed Covenant Review to send email newsletters directly from the app when new reports are released.
  • Integrated a sophisticated ‘XML to PDF’ tool into the application that automatically converted data points into a high-quality PDF that could be presented to Wall Street investors, removing a manual task from employees’ desks.
  • Implemented a framework for a complex numerical and textual database that helped users grasp key bond information quickly.

TESTIMONIAL

Technical proficiency

I did not reach out to other software vendors because based on initial discussions, I was confident of the abilities of the team at Asahi Technologies. In retrospective, I feel good about that decision. Trustworthiness, diligence and technical proficiency are three of the key attributes of the team that worked on this project.

Adam Cohen, New York
Founder, Covenant Review

IMPACT

An intuitive web app providing multiple uses for lawyers, paralegals, investment analysts, administrators, account managers and investment advisers

We created a cloud-based web application for our client that’s functional for different types of users. Paralegals and investment analysts can share legal research on the platform and investment advisors can access timely and cost-effective advice to shape their investment decisions. From the client’s perspective, account managers now have a better understanding of how subscribers interact with the application and a broad view of all users, allowing them to fine tune the experience.

Our work delivered a comprehensive workflow management system that allowed the client’s in-house analysts and legal team to easily add information to the app. Each type of employee has appropriate permissions, too. Paralegals can update bond pricing, maturity dates and other information, administrators can add and alter user access, and analysts (qualified lawyers) can update more complex information, such as bondholder rights and terms.

With this new application, subscribers can get professional looking reports in their inbox and the client can use a complex combination of parameters to tailor subscriptions according to geography, bond type and term.