Titanium Birch cuts illiquid fund data processing time by 87.5% with Arch

The trouble with illiquid fund data

Titanium Birch, an evergreen investment firm, invests across a wide range of illiquid funds, vehicles that call capital, make investments over time, and return distributions to their limited partners. For these holdings, the firm relies almost entirely on fund managers to supply the data needed to evaluate performance, and each manager shares that information differently, making it difficult for anyone on the team to get a clear, consolidated view.

Fund manager updates: capital-call requests, distribution notices, account statements, audited financial statements, quarterly reports, newsletters, and other communications arrive on unpredictable schedules and in nearly every format imaginable. Some managers use investor portals, others send email, and others work through private banks. The underlying data is similarly inconsistent: PDFs and other non-machine-readable files, prose, numbers, charts, tables, and footnotes.

Titanium Birch's original process depended entirely on manual effort. A fund manager document would arrive in a designated inbox, triggering a Jira ticket and a Slack notification. A team member — coverage rotated across the investment-operations team — would log into the relevant portal, download the document, file it in Google Drive, determine whether it was actionable (such as a capital call), and manually update a fund inventory in Airtable with enough detail to construct the necessary journal entries. Non-actionable updates, like webinars or newsletters, required no further action.

Each member of the team found the process extremely manual, and the constant Slack notifications meant frequent context-switching. There was also a lingering concern that a capital call could be missed entirely, a risk compounded by the fact that unrealized gains and losses, and valuation adjustments, still needed to be recorded accurately in the firm's general ledger, LedgerPigeon.

A better way to wrangle data from alternative investments

Titanium Birch set out to standardize and structure its fund-investment information flows to cover document tracking (confirming expected updates like audited financials, quarterly reports, and account statements had been received), a clear breakdown of capital calls and distributions, performance metrics such as unrealized gains/losses and DPI/TVPI, cash-flow forecasting, and alerts for new capital calls — all while minimizing the human effort required to wrangle documents, crunch numbers, and stay on top of deadlines.

After evaluating several vendors, Titanium Birch chose Arch. Arch fit the firm's requirements because it addressed the use cases above cost-effectively, supported single sign-on for data protection, linked directly to the firm's fund portals as an "interested third party,” eliminating the need for someone to manually corral documents, and triaged incoming documents into one centralized location, automatically updating contribution and distribution amounts for each fund. A well-documented API lets the team build their own automated ingestion into LedgerPigeon, their general ledger, without creating a separate data silo inside Arch. The Arch team's responsiveness to feedback and pace of product iteration were also factors in the decision.

After onboarding, Titanium Birch built a pipeline to pull data from the Arch API, ingest it into their data lake, and process it into journal entries for financial-statement purposes, including mapping complex, mixed capital call and distribution events to the correct entries. The same underlying data now also powers the firm's portfolio analytics, enabling profit-and-loss attribution with no manual data preparation. On a near-daily basis, the team can reconcile current valuations against the sum of all cashflows to complete the full P&L picture, stepping in only when the automated logic encounters a genuinely novel situation.

Monthly processing time for illiquid fund data fell from roughly 8 hours to under 1 hour, an 87.5% reduction. Beyond the time savings, the team gained confidence that every expected document had been received, peace of mind that no capital call would be missed, and relief from the repetitive manual work the process previously required.

Looking ahead, Titanium Birch is exploring even more granular breakdowns across funds in its financial statements, structuring data embedded in prose-style updates, and using Arch's data for cash-flow forecasting.

This case study is adapted from Titanium Birch's own account of their Arch integration — read the full post, including technical diagrams of their data pipeline, here.