Huntington Beach, California
Alisa Backstrom is the City Treasurer for Huntington Beach, California, more popularly known as “Surf City USA.” Alisa is a part-time elected official in the city of nearly 200,000 residents and was laboring under an old system that created a lot of extra work as well as logistical problems. She was managing the investments of city funds — with a system that was neither cloud based nor had modern formatting, requiring her to be in the office to operate. Her limited hours made that difficult, and COVID made it nearly impossible.
“We would have to create all of our own presentation materials,” Alisa says. “We manually developed our own graphs and charts for our reporting. In order to invest, we would have to spend time updating and analyzing the portfolio outside of the system.”
When Alisa decided to subscribe to MaxQ, she says their staff were “very accessible,” and worked to “understand our needs and requirements to set up everything exactly how we wanted it, with a focus on public fund investing. With MaxQ, they are knowledgeable about the specific processes from start to finish, and we felt like we had their full support and availability.”
The City Treasurer says the new system has an “ease of use, anywhere, anytime” functionality that simply allows her to be more effective at her job, saving as much as three days of work each month she can now spend on other duties.
“It’s a one-stop shop investment management system,” she says. “It manages not only all of our investment and portfolio analysis, but also creates the monthly journal entries for easy upload into our ERP system.” “MaxQ has increased our team’s confidence in selecting and tracking our investments. All of the processes are seamless and very intuitive, from trade management through the monthly reporting.” Alisa says, “the information is correct and up to date in our system at all times — we can review our investment goals and immunization status (ALM) to make informed investing decisions quickly and efficiently — and we’re transmitting the correct information to our internal partners.”