Threads: One Place Where Your People, Agents and Partners Work Together

Collaboration in asset management has outgrown the inbox. Next Gate Tech now brings Threads to SPARK: one shared space where your teams, your AI agents and your wider ecosystem of delegates, administrators and partners work on the same topic, with the data right beside the conversation.

The problem: oversight work is split across email chains, calls, spreadsheets and portals. Context is lost at every hand-off, and AI agents sit in yet another window.
The answer: Threads organises work by topic, in channels and threads with mentions and notifications built in. People and agents take part in the same conversation, and agents can call on other agents, or on a person when judgment is needed.
The value: faster resolution of issues, less time spent chasing information, a complete and searchable record for governance, and a practical first step towards human-agent teams.

The collaboration gap: work happens everywhere, context lives nowhere

A single question about a fund rarely stays inside one team. Take a NAV that moves more than expected. The risk team at the management company spots it, the fund administrator holds the explanation, the portfolio manager confirms the trade behind it, and the conducting officer needs the outcome for the oversight file.

That is four parties, often in three organisations, and in most firms the work still travels by email. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the average interaction worker spends 28 percent of the workweek managing email and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help (McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy). In oversight, where every answer must also be evidenced, that cost compounds.

The gap shows up in four ways:

Lost context. The data sits in one system, the discussion in an inbox, the decision in someone's head. Every new person on the thread starts from zero.
Slow resolution. Queries wait for the next email, the next call, the next out-of-office reply. Small issues become late issues.
A fragile audit trail. When a board or regulator asks how an issue was resolved, the evidence has to be rebuilt from forwarded emails and meeting notes.
Agents on the sidelines. AI agents now do real work, but they usually live in a separate tool. Their findings are copied back into the conversation by hand, if at all.

Introducing Threads: one shared workspace for people and agents

Threads brings the familiar feel of a team messaging app into SPARK, where your data, workflows and agents already live. Each channel is a space for one topic: a fund, a client, a delegate or a recurring process. Inside it, threads keep each issue in its own conversation, and built-in notifications tell the right person when their input is needed.

What Threads brings, and what sets it apart from a generic chat tool:

Public and private channels. Public channels are open to the whole workspace, while private channels keep sensitive topics to the people who need them. Direct messages cover one-to-one conversations with a colleague or with an agent.
A thread for every topic. Every message posted in a channel starts its own thread, so replies, updates and follow-ups stay together without cluttering the channel.
Agents you can tag. Mention an agent, such as Spark, in a channel or thread to ask a question, run a workflow or act on your data. Agents can tag other agents, or a person, in the same way.
Work you can see. When an agent acts, its reply shows the steps it took, and a panel beside the thread lists the data objects involved.
Notifications and search built in. Mentions and replies surface in one place, and every conversation stays searchable, ready for the next review or audit.

A channel in SPARK. Every message starts its own thread, and the people and agents who answered are shown under it.

Internal collaboration: one team, one version of the truth

Inside a management company, oversight is shared between risk, compliance, operations, portfolio management and the conducting officers. Each function sees part of the picture. A channel gives them a common room, organised around the way the business actually runs.

A channel per fund range. Risk, compliance and operations follow the same funds in one place. A liquidity alert raised by risk is visible to compliance at once, and the thread shows who acted and when.
A channel per process. A daily NAV control or a monthly reporting cycle gets its own channel. Exceptions are discussed in threads, and the agent running the check posts its results there every day.
Faster onboarding and handovers. A new analyst joins the channel and reads the history, instead of asking colleagues to forward old emails. Holiday cover becomes a non-event.

The effect is that decisions are made with full context, and they stay findable. The same McKinsey research estimates that a searchable record of knowledge can cut the time employees spend searching for company information by as much as 35 percent.

External collaboration: bringing delegates and partners into the conversation

Management companies stay accountable for every function they delegate: fund administration, transfer agency, portfolio management, distribution. Regulators expect that oversight to be continuous and evidenced. Yet the dialogue with delegates still runs mostly on email and periodic meetings.

Threads lets you invite the people you work with outside your organisation into dedicated spaces, so the oversight dialogue happens where the oversight data lives.

Delegate oversight. Open a channel with your fund administrator for each fund range. When a control flags a NAV variance or a late file, the query goes to the administrator in a thread, with the agent's analysis alongside. The answer and the resolution are recorded in the same place.
Service provider queries. Missing data feeds, late reports, data quality questions: each becomes a thread with a clear owner, not an email lost in a shared mailbox.
Client collaboration. Third-party management companies and service providers can give each client a channel for requests, deliverables and sign-offs, replacing scattered follow-ups.
Due diligence and onboarding. A new delegate or a new fund launch gets a channel that holds the questions, the follow-ups and the final approval.

For the conducting officer, the result is an oversight trail that builds itself. Who raised the issue, who answered, what was decided and when: none of it has to be reconstructed after the fact.

Humans and agents side by side: agents as teammates, not tools

Most firms meet AI through a separate assistant window: you ask, you copy the answer, you paste it into an email. Threads changes the model. Agents become members of the team, present in the same conversations as people.

Ask in place. In any thread, mention an agent to pull the latest figures, explain a variance or draft a reply. Its answer lands in the thread, visible to everyone involved.
Agents that speak up. An agent running a daily control posts its findings to the relevant channel and tags the owner when something needs attention.
Agents that work together. An agent can call on another agent with a different skill, such as a data-quality agent handing over to a reporting agent, or escalate to a person when judgment is required.
People stay in charge. Decisions, approvals and sign-offs remain with people, and the thread shows clearly what the agent did and what a person decided.

An agent answering in a thread. Its steps are one click away, and the answer is visible to everyone in the conversation.

What it looks like in practice. A user asks Spark, the SPARK agent, to tidy up how two tables connect: remove two outdated relationships, create a new one and fill it in for every row. Spark carries out the task in 23 visible steps and reports back in the thread: old relationships archived, a new reference column created, and all 81 NAV records linked to the active share classes. The user checks the result in the same place, with both data objects listed beside the thread.

This is what "human on the loop" looks like in daily work. Agents take on the repetitive gathering and checking. People spend their time on judgment, relationships and decisions.

The ecosystem in one place

Threads sits at the centre of SPARK, between your data, your people, your agents and the organisations you work with. Instead of moving information between systems and inboxes, every party comes to the same conversation with the same facts in view.

Threads in SPARK: your data, workflows, teams, partners and agents connect in one place, one thread per topic.

Every query, from a daily NAV check to a board report, has one home, and everyone who needs to act on it can see it there.

Exceptions, resolved where they are raised

Investment operations run on two kinds of work: producing reports, and reacting to the exceptions that controls raise. The second is where teams at asset managers, asset servicers and asset owners spend most of their day. A control fires, someone investigates, someone else explains, and a person decides. Threads shortens that loop, and keeps every step on record.

The NGT Exception Framework already handles the first half. An NGT Skill picks the checks, an NGT Analytics Tool calculates the result, and the framework opens a case only where a check fails. Related events are grouped into Points of Attention, and each one arrives as an investigation report with a proposed root cause, the precedent attached and an owner assigned. On one deployment, around 1,500 NAVs a day produce roughly 30 investigation reports a week (NGT Tools: The Exception Framework).

The second half, resolving the case, rarely stays inside one team. The owner needs the administrator's explanation, the portfolio manager's confirmation or the compliance view. Until now, that step left the framework and went to email. With Threads it stays in SPARK:

The case opens in the channel. The framework posts the investigation report in the channel for that fund, process or delegate and tags the owner. The thread is the case.
Everyone works on the same evidence. The panel beside the thread shows the signals and data objects behind the exception. A delegate invited into the thread sees the same case as the internal team, not a summary of it.
Agents keep the case moving. An investigation agent can test dozens of hypotheses where an analyst would check three or four, attach the precedent, draft the reply to the administrator or open the follow-up workflow. The person signs off. No exception is closed without a person.
Resolution is traced end to end. The audit trail that already covers every check, case and decision now covers the conversation as well. Who was asked, what they answered, what the agent did and who approved: all of it sits on the case, replayable for an auditor or a regulator.

The result is a shorter path from event to sign-off, across organisations, with the evidence building itself along the way. Agents own progress. People own decisions.

Every step an agent takes is listed in its reply, so the person signing off sees exactly what was done.

Threads in action: six everyday scenarios

The value of Threads shows most clearly in the work oversight teams do every week. Six examples, most of them exception cases of the kind described above:

Scenario	How it works today	How it works with Threads	What changes
NAV variance on a fund	An alert appears in a report. Risk emails the administrator, waits for a reply, then files the evidence by hand.	An agent posts the variance and its first analysis in the fund channel and tags the administrator, who answers in the thread.	One thread from alert to resolution, with the evidence already in place.
Investment restriction breach	Compliance emails the portfolio manager, then escalates by phone. The timeline is pieced together later.	A compliance agent flags the breach in the compliance channel and tags the portfolio manager and the conducting officer. The remediation plan is agreed in the thread.	A clear, time-stamped record from detection to remediation.
Late or missing data from a provider	Reports are held while someone chases the file across mailboxes.	A data agent detects the missing file, opens a thread in the provider channel and notifies the provider contact.	Earlier detection and fewer held reports.
Monthly board risk report	Inputs arrive from five people in five emails, in several versions.	An agent drafts the report in the reporting channel, owners comment in threads and the conducting officer signs off.	One source, one version, one approval trail.
Fund launch, change or liquidation	A new share class or a prospectus update travels through legal, product, risk, operations and the administrator by email. Each party updates its own records, and the fund master drifts out of line.	The fund gets a channel for its life cycle, with the Fund Life Cycle plugin running the procedure. The agent ingests the prospectus, posts the proposed changes to the golden record in a thread and tags the owner. Legal, operations and the administrator confirm in the same thread, and the data is published once a person signs off.	One golden record of the fund and its share classes, every change signed off, with the whole ecosystem working from the same version.
Delegate due diligence	Initial and periodic due diligence runs on questionnaires sent by email. Answers arrive late or incomplete, and the delegate's information is already out of date by the time the review is filed.	Each delegate has a channel where the due diligence agent posts the questionnaire, collects the answers and flags gaps or changes against the previous review. The delegate answers in threads, and compliance and the conducting officer review and approve in place.	Delegate information that stays current between reviews, and a due diligence file that is complete when the review closes rather than rebuilt afterwards.

The business impact: five value levers

For leaders, Threads is less about messaging and more about how oversight work gets done. The value comes through five levers:

Speed. Issues are resolved in the thread where they are raised, without waiting for the next email cycle. A shorter time from detection to resolution reduces operational and regulatory risk.
Productivity. Less time searching, forwarding and chasing. Agents take on data gathering and first-level analysis, freeing specialists for judgment. McKinsey estimates that better communication and collaboration could raise knowledge worker productivity by 20 to 25 percent.
Governance and auditability. Every query, answer and decision is time-stamped and searchable. Evidence for boards, auditors and regulators is a search away, not a reconstruction.
Stronger delegate relationships. A shared, structured space makes expectations clear and responses visible on both sides, which lifts service quality over time.
Operations that scale. As fund ranges and delegates grow, human-agent teams absorb the extra volume without a matching rise in headcount or email traffic.

Getting started

Threads is live in SPARK. The firms that get the most from it start small and grow from a clear win:

Start with one process. Pick a recurring control or report where several people already collaborate by email.
Bring in the agent. Add the agent that runs the check to the channel, so its results land where the team works.
Invite one delegate. Open a channel with a key administrator or provider and move their queries into threads.
Review after a month. Look at how quickly issues closed and how easily the evidence could be found, then extend to the next process.

Threads is the foundation for how people, agents and partners will work together in SPARK: one place, one conversation, one record.

Want to see Threads in action? Book a demo with the NGT team or contact your account manager.

Sources

McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, July 2012.
Next Gate Tech, NGT Exception Framework, platform page.
Next Gate Tech, NGT Tools: The Exception Framework, August 2026.