Fortress Invesment Group Case Study

Detailed tracking of a complex plan.

About

Fortress Investment Group LLC is a privately held global investment company that manages approximately $44 billion in assets, utilizing
a range of credit, real estate, private equity, and permanent capital investment strategies. Headquartered in New York, the firm has about
900 employees around the world.

The Challenge

Fortress has used Decusoft’s Compose for its compensation planning and management since 2011. Over that time, Fortress has worked with
Decusoft to help expand the platform’s capabilities to serve the needs of complex financial firms. We spoke to Jennifer Apilado, Director of
Compensation at Fortress, who oversees the firm’s compensation process and has partnered with Decusoft since 2011.

Thinking back to 2011, why did you decide to adopt a compensation management system?

Prior to Compose, the Excel-based compensation process in place was manually taxing with data sourced from different systems and
stakeholders. Due to the extensive compensation information changes we received, the increasing volume of participant data collated
and analyzed during our cycles, and the antiquated spreadsheet architecture in place, we recognized that the current process no
longer operated efficiently to address our evolving comp structure and our various needs on compensation related deliverables.
Furthermore, with any manual process, the probability of error was high, and we strive for no delay in the delivery of critical participant
compensation information.

After concluding our year-end 2010 cycle, we realized we needed a centralized system that could be easily used by our managers, enable
us to streamline our process, provide an audit trail of changes, and allow us to configure security profiles based on who can access and
provide compensation recommendations. Ultimately, we wanted to minimize the use of email to exchange confidential static excel files
among several different parties.

Why did you choose Compose?

After a thorough vendor search, we chose Compose as it could handle the complexity of our compensation planning, while providing us
with features critical to our success: a secure database, audit trails and robust reporting capabilities.

The Solution

Why did you choose Compose?

We use Compose to facilitate our quarterly and year-end compensation planning process. It’s a centralized, secure system that helps us compile
and organize all the relevant compensation information – salary, bonus, promotions, LTI – necessary to report data to our various business
stakeholders with speed and accuracy.

A feature that has worked well for us is Compose’s customizable compensation grid. The Decusoft team has been instrumental
in helping us customize the comp grid view for certain business managers, allowing them to see data — past year’s compensation,
years of experience, last year’s promotion date, etc. — in order to help them make informed compensation recommendations.

The Results

What is it like to work with the Decusoft team?

From the start, it’s been a great partnership. We’ve appreciated the high-touch relationship Decusoft has been keen to establish with
Fortress. Everybody — the founders, the CTO, the programmers — has always been a phone call or an email away.

As expected, Decusoft has grown and expanded. With that growth came a new set of processes in which we were expected to adhere to, i.e., utilizing a ticketing system to log all requests, managing our expectations that solutions could not be delivered overnight. However, if we needed something done urgently, Decusoft does its best to gather the appropriate resources to ensure a quick resolution. One thing that has not changed is that Decusoft has always treated us like we are a valued client.

What difference has Compose made to Fortress?

With the use of a centralized system, our process is much more streamlined. Compose has helped us organize our compensation
data in a meaningful way, ensuring the accuracy of compensation deliverables and mitigating errors that come from manual efforts.

We’ve been a client since 2011. The longevity of our partnership speaks volumes of Compose’s role in the success of our annual compensation
process.