Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners invest in efficient fund management

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) is an investment company committed to building a greener future. The company manages 10 large investment funds, all dedicated to the development and construction of renewable, sustainable energy production.

“Ensuring that our funds perform well is vital to helping our partners keep renewable energy projects on track and profitable,” explains Casper Korsager Hardinger, Senior Manager, Financial Planning and Analysis at CIP. “Renewable energy infrastructure often has an incredibly long lifecycle — up to 70 years in some cases — and as a result, our financial planning activities are typically more complex than traditional investment funds because we must account for many more variables that could impact an investment throughout its lifetime.”

Since its inception, the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team at CIP modelled fund performance using spreadsheets. As funds grew, tracking performance became increasingly cumbersome and the risk of human errors grew.

“Working with spreadsheets created a lot of low-value, time-consuming work,” says Kristina Kolchedantseva, Senior Financial Associate at CIP. “It would take a team of three finance experts over a week to compile data for our quarterly fund reports into spreadsheets, and four more days to create slide decks for stakeholder meetings.” Simply opening the spreadsheets could take five minutes, and large calculations would often crash them. As a result, CIP experts couldn’t look at more than two fund models at a time, or model more than 20 scenarios simultaneously.
 

 Preparing for growth

When CIP decided to add two large funds to its portfolio, the company chose to replace its spreadsheets with Anaplan. “Anaplan stood out for its versatility and flexibility,” says Hardinger. “We could see that the Anaplan solution could handle the complexity of our models, process vast amounts of data quickly, and tailor our models to our business requirements without lengthy customization.”

CIP enlisted Lionpoint to implement Anaplan and help build the first models. “We were really pleased to leverage Anaplan’s flexibility to seamlessly blend a suite of standard and asset-specific scenarios and roll-up to the portfolio level, providing powerful ‘what-if’ analysis to the CIP fund analysts," notes Iain Briggs, Associate Director, EPM Practice at Lionpoint Group.

 “Lionpoint helped us realize the potential of Anaplan in under four months, and since then we have taken full control of our Anaplan environment and built additional functionality ourselves,” comments Kolchedantseva. “Anaplan’s cloud processing capabilities, which we access from our laptops and mobiles, are a huge win for our work-life balance. We no longer need to run calculations using the high-performance computers in our office. We can do it live during meetings, or even on the way to grab a morning coffee.”
 

 Transforming investment fund management

“Establishing standardized processes in Anaplan enables us to distribute much of the data aggregation to other teams,” explains Hardinger. “So, instead of three financial experts spending a week on data aggregation, our business units now enter data directly into Anaplan for analysis. Standardized processes all but eliminate the risk of errors and reduce time spent on data validation. This means that we can invest more time supporting business leaders in understanding fund performance.”

Teams at CIP use Anaplan to create slide decks detailing fund performance 87% faster — down from four days to just under half a day. And if last-minute changes are needed, they can update charts in under 10 minutes. “But we’ve achieved so much more with Anaplan than faster reports,” explains Kolchedantseva. “Previously we were limited to 20 different scenarios per spreadsheet, but with Anaplan we can look at over 25,000 scenarios in combination.” This means teams can examine how funds perform along many different dimensions and investigate the relationship between variables and scenarios in much greater detail. “Most of all, we can add more value to the business by focusing on what we do best: helping investors achieve strong returns on renewable energy developments.”