The Investment Committee and board were receiving comprehensive data packs that answered questions nobody was asking. The restructured reporting framework gave trustees and senior stakeholders the information they needed to govern — without requiring a technical briefing to interpret it.
The firm produced regular Investment Committee packs and board reports. They were thorough — extensive performance attribution, detailed position data, multiple risk tables. But the IC was not using them to govern. Meetings consumed significant preparation time, reached few actionable conclusions, and left board members less certain than when they arrived.
The root cause was structural: the reporting had been designed around what the systems could produce, not around the decisions the IC needed to make. Risk exceptions were buried in tables. Performance attribution was presented without the narrative context that would make it actionable. The board pack presented everything tracked — rather than the specific information trustees needed to fulfil their governance responsibilities.
The additional pressure was operational: report preparation required significant manual effort from a small team. As the investment universe grew, that burden was scaling linearly with complexity.