New Mountain Capital

THE SITUATION

New Mountain Capital is a New York-based private equity firm that emphasizes business building and growth as it pursues long-term capital appreciation. The firm currently manages private, public equity, and credit funds with over $9 billion in aggregate capital commitments.

New Mountain has grown tremendously since its founding, and it has also become much more diverse. It started with an initial $770 million private equity fund in 2000 and continued with a second $1.5 billion fund in 2005 and a third $5.1 billion fund in 2007. New Mountain also manages public equity portfolios through New Mountain Vantage Advisers and a credit fund through New Mountain Finance Advisors BDC, LLC.

THE SOLUTION

New Mountain Capital was one of the first private equity sponsors to use Intralinks, beginning in 2002. Initially, the firm’s investor communications process was laborious and time consuming, and it soon became clear that this approach would not be scalable as the firm began to grow. New Mountain began looking for ways to deliver investor reports electronically. It chose Intralinks because it was powerful, simple to implement, and intuitive to use. “When the number of investors more than tripled with our third fund,” explained Adam Weinstein, Managing Director of New Mountain, “we were happy we had made the technology investment in Intralinks that could support that intense growth.”

New Mountain has continued to depend on Intralinks because the platform has grown and evolved in step with the company’s own growth. It manages investor reporting and communications for three private equity funds using Intralinks. The firm also uses Intralinks to support the board meetings of the New Mountain Finance Corporation, and the materials needed to support the board are managed and distributed within Intralinks. “Someone on my team is probably using Intralinks almost every day,” commented Weinstein.

Recently, New Mountain expanded its use of Intralinks to allow the compliance team to ensure that proper security and access control is being maintained within all the data rooms. The firm now has visibility into who accessed what information and when they did it.

THE BENEFITS

Weinstein shared two stories that highlighted the benefits of using Intralinks.

As its third private equity fund was closing in 2007, New Mountain had an early opportunity to acquire a high potential business that would create a massive amount of reporting paperwork in a very short order. People were working 24 hours straight to close the deal, but Intralinks helped New Mountain send out the capital call notices to its investors within a day or two, which was critical for funding the investment.

New Mountain maintains a large data room to manage everything from its portfolio companies to client-specific investment reporting. Weinstein is especially impressed with the ability to give people permission to do specific tasks, which allows him or his team to grant access permission to various internal and external partners for different reporting purposes. However, in doing so, New Mountain still maintains oversight on the distribution of their information. “Intralinks helps us keep tight control on security,” concluded Weinstein, “but it doesn’t come at the expense of speed or ease of use.”