FOTechHub Bulletin: Family Office Technology News Roundup – December, 2023

Company News, Integrations and Product Updates

Arch’s Funding and Expansion: Arch, a technology platform that automates the operations and reporting for private investments, has raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by Menlo Ventures, joined by existing and new investors: Craft Ventures, Quiet Capital, Carta, Citi Ventures, GPS Investment Partners and Focus Financial Partners, and individuals such as the founder of Vanilla. The lion’s share of the funding is earmarked for R&D, focusing on reducing risk of fraud to make capital calls safer and connecting the dots between data by integrating with other systems, such as general ledgers, reporting platforms and CRMs. They’re also gearing up to release an API to allow anyone to hook up to it. Arch’s initial funding in 2021 raised $5.5 million, and since then the company grew to 60 smart minds with some $62 billion served on the platform, across 50 RIAs and multi family offices, 50 single family offices, and a couple dozen institutional clients. See more from Diana Britton as well as this recent commentary from various industry voices.

Addepar’s Stellar Growth: Addepar hit a remarkable milestone on December 13, managing an impressive $5 trillion in assets while doubling its client base to over 1,000 firms in two years. This 15-year-old data aggregation and performance software company, boasting around 850 team members, is committed to sustaining $100 million in R&D annually. While eyeing the smaller $100-million RIA segment, their ambitious growth plans have piqued some industry eyebrows.

Canoe’s Partnerships and Growing Team: Following the recent release of Canoe Tax, Canoe partnered with K1x – a data distribution platform for alternative investments. Through this partnership, Canoe and K1x are providing an end-to-end K-1 solution for clients who want to automate more than just the first page and integrate with downstream tax systems. They can export tax documents collected by Canoe into the AI-powered K-1 Analyzer from K1x, which reads and extracts the entire PDF of K-1 data including all 1200 fields of the K-3. Canoe’s other initiatives include the upcoming release of Canoe Asset Data in Q1 2024, aiming for portfolio transparency through analysis of asset-level data for exposure and due diligence; Canoe Pro, a collaboration with Amplify Advisory Solutions and others to offer support in document retrieval, organization, and reconciliation; and partnership with Deviate Consulting to help family offices adopt Canoe’s tech and streamline implementations. Canoe recently grew their team with five senior professionals and appointed Tricia Rothschild to their board, tapping into her deep financial technology background.

Ledgex and Forest Systems Join Forces providing family offices with an integrated solution supporting their investment and accounting needs. Ledgex brings LedgexPro for portfolio management, private markets analytics and clever data management for both accounting and investment books. Meanwhile, Forest Systems is the accounting expert, customizing its engine for all sorts of family office entities—from partnerships to trusts and everything in between. Their general ledger, complete with Bill Pay and AR/AP modules supports cash management, tax accounting, and balance sheet consolidation. This integration is aiming to simplify operations and complex reconciliations across systems, cutting down on the number of vendors.

Forest Systems has been busy forming partnerships: They also teamed up wiht KnowLedger LLC to offer family offices and accounting firms a comprehensive solution for investment and accounting needs. This collaboration combines KnowLedger’s expertise in transitioning bank, custodian, private equity, and venture capital related data directly from the data sources or via portfolio accounting systems with Forest Systems’ specialized accounting support for family offices.

Mirador’s New VP of Reporting & Alkymi Integration: Meet Konstantinos (Gus) Papachristou, the newest addition to Mirador’s team who is joining from Private Client Resources. He will be teaming up with Michael Colletti to co-lead the alternative data management team, leveraging their RELI (Retrieve, Extract, Label, Ingest) platform, now equipped with Alkymi’s AI and machine learning powers for turbo-speed processing of alternative investment statements into useful information for better decisions and reporting.

Maestro FS to Trove: Maestro FS rebranded as Trove (trove.net), blending the best of Maestro Financial Solutions, Martin DeCruze & Company, Cornerstone Family Office, and JDJ Family Office Services. Trove provides a whole suite of outsourced, tech-enabled services: administrative family office solutions, accounting and financial reporting for privately held businesses and alternative asset managers, and tax services.

Performativ’s Funding and Euro-Quest: Performativ, a Danish wealthtech startup, secured €5.5 million in seed funding let by Fintech Collective, with its sights set on the European wealth management market, including single and multi-family offices. Boasting experience from founders originating from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, the platform aims to streamline everything from the front to back office. Performativ’s pre-seed funding of $700,000 was backed by the Danish Sovereign Wealth fund, amongst others. The company is handling some €20 billion in assets.

Black Diamond CRM: SS&C Technologies rolled out a new CRM module within the SS&C Black Diamond Wealth Platform, available to Black Diamond’s 2000 client firms, as well as Advent’s Axys and APX users. It’s tailor-made for wealth managers and advisory firms, particularly five- to ten-advisor RIAs, with an annual cost ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. It offers tools for managing client interactions, streamlining account setup, and integrating with major email platforms, and can be upgraded to SS&C’s other CRM solutions – Salentica Elements (Salesforce overlay) and Salentica Engage (run on Microsoft Dynamics). Dive deeper here with Oisin Breen. At the same time, SS&C Salentica also released as set of updates for both – Elements and Engage products.

Accelex Accelerates with $15M Series A Boost from FactSet: London-headquartered Accelex just sealed a $15 million Series A round. FactSet, the global financial digital solutions powerhouse, led the round, teaming up with Illuminate Financial, AlbionVC, SixThirty Ventures, and Expon Capital. This influx of funds isn’t solely for Accelex; it’s a significant booster for ramping up FactSet’s private markets growth strategy. Accelex’s specialty is automating the entire lifecycle of private market investments—from document acquisition to reporting and analytics. Since launching in 2018, they’ve been making moves, with offices in Paris, Luxembourg, New York, and Toronto. They’re here to serve asset owners, allocators, and service providers.

iCapital and IQ-EQ Partnership in France: iCapital and IQ-EQ have forged a strategic alliance to broaden alternative investment horizons for French individual investors. Despite France’s substantial wealth market, only a fraction of it is currently allocated to private markets. To address this, the collaboration aims to introduce new French-domiciled funds, utilizing iCapital’s technological prowess and IQ-EQ’s expertise in fund administration. These offerings will be available on iCapital Marketplace to French banks and wealth managers.

PBI & 7 Chord’s Integration: PBI, an investment management system for asset managers and allocators, now integrates 7 Chord’s BondDroid AI for live bond pricing. BondDroid analyzes 100M+ data points daily, generating actionable prices, yields, and spreads from diverse market info. 7 Chord specializes in predictive pricing and analytics.

Technology Upgrades and Developments: SS&C Technologies announced updates to its SS&C Advent solutions, enhancing functionalities in syndicated and private loan accounting and managed services. Meanwhile, the Swiss-based Altoo AG introduced Altoo Insights, a digital news platform covering wealth management, ESG investing, lifestyle features, and IT security across multiple languages.

AI-Powered Wealth Leap: Vyzer’s $6.3M Seed Funding: Vyzer, an AI-driven digital wealth management platform, has raised $6.3 million in seed funding to offer high-net-worth and DIY investors a unified solution for managing complex portfolios. By providing tools for financial analysis, planning, and forecasting in one dashboard,  Co-founded by Litan Yahav, Tomer Salvi, and Guy Gamzu, Vyzer aims to make sophisticated wealth management accessible at a flat annual fee, bypassing expensive traditional advisors. The platform’s key features include financial analysis, planning, tracking, automated data management, insightful analytics, peer benchmarking, and forecasting, which are all accessible through a single dashboard. 

More People Moves

Eton Solutions hired Mark Wickersham as Senior VP of Marketing and Business Development. Mark will drive Eton’s growth in the family office market, leveraging his 30+ years of broad fintech experience.

Foundation Source welcomed to its board Pam Norley from Fidelity Charitable and Chip Roame, founder of Tiburon Strategic Advisors. They bring some serious expertise in charitable giving and wealth management.

Jack Swift stepped down from his position as president of TIFIN, the AI-powered fintech company supported by heavy hitters like JP Morgan, Morningstar, Hamilton Lane, Franklin Templeton, Motive Partners, Broadridge, and more.

In depth

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is going into effect on January 1, 2024, impacting millions of small businesses across the U.S. See this handy summary from Charmaine Tang and Richard Wolkowitz.