Ask any portfolio operations team how long a reporting cycle takes and you'll get an answer in days, not hours. Ask how many people touch it and you'll get a list that quietly includes some of the most expensive seniors in the firm.
Across 39 funds, multiply that by twelve cycles a year. The cost isn't on a line item, because nobody pays it as a service. It comes out of headcount that could have been doing something else — manager research, allocation work, client conversations.
Automation here isn't a moonshot. The data exists, the templates are mostly stable, the calculations are well-understood. What's missing is the engineering discipline to wire it together once and run it on a schedule.
When we did this at a Zurich foundation, the multi-day manual cycle compressed to a near-automated one. The seniors didn't disappear from the process — they moved up the stack, from doing the work to checking it.