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

Company news

 

27 July – TIFIN, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for wealth launched TIFIN.AI to develop TIFIN’s second cohort of AI-powered fintech companies. J.P. Morgan has joined TIFIN in funding TIFIN.AI. The formation of TIFIN.AI builds upon TIFIN Studios, which created five companies between 2018 and 2021. The first iteration of Studios included launches and exits such as J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of 55ip in 2020, the spin-off of Paralel Technologies, and the foundation of TIFIN’s three subsidiaries Magnifi, TIFIN Wealth, and TIFIN AMP.

 

26 July – iCapital launched Architect, a portfolio analytics tool for financial professionals to build personalized client portfolios incorporating alternatives and structured investments. Among the tool’s features are resources for evaluating historical performance and running risk factor analyses. In other news, iCapital added TIAA Nuveen’s farmland strategy to its platform. The strategy invests in wine grapes, US row crops such as corn, rice, soybean and cotton, and horticulture crops such as almonds, pistachios and raisin grapes.

 

19 July – Mirador, Inc., a managed services partner to the U/HNW wealth management industry that provides financial reporting services and technology solutions, upgraded its compensation management services for wealth managers and RIAs, encompassing sales, profitability, and compensation reporting. The latest enhancements include an expanded team, enhanced product capabilities, extended roster of third-party offerings and data sourcing, quicker data uploading, system maintenance, and streamlined onboarding of new advisors.

 

18 July – Foundation Source launched Impactfully Select, a proprietary cloud-based platform developed to address the operational, expense management and grantmaking needs of private foundations. The software, available on a subscription basis, complements Foundation Source’s full-service foundation management solutions. The platform combines workflows and features that support daily operations of foundations and allow their financial, tax and legal advisors to support their philanthropic efforts. The company appointed Michael P. Beville as chief revenue officer (CRO), bringing nonprofit and technology experience from his previous role at Blackbaud.

 

18 July – Masttro unveiled a new brand identity in the effort to “cement its position as thought leader in wealth tech. Masttro was launched in 2010 by Javier Gutierrez and Domingo Viesca and has grown into a global enterprise serving wealth owners and managers through its proprietary technology and aggregating data from 550+ direct global custodian connections.

 

18 July – Allfunds announced Allfunds Private Partners (APP) program to support access to private market funds by its clients and to provide fund managers with an opportunity to make their products available to Allfunds distribution network. Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, Franklin Templeton, and Morgan Stanley Investment Management have joined as the first participants. APP builds on Allfunds Alternative Solutions (AAS), launched earlier this year to make alternative funds more accessible to distributors, particularly from the wealth management segment. The AAS team has been developing the technology that streamlines the operational aspects of private asset investments.

 

11 July – Dynamo Software signed a redistribution agreement with S&P Dow Jones Indices to automatically provide Cambridge Associates’ private investment benchmarks to Dynamo’s limited partners and asset allocator clients on a quarterly basis. S&P Dow Jones Indices is the exclusive distributor of CA’s benchmark. Dynamo’s clients can sign up for one or more index families, including venture capital, private equity, private credit, real assets, and aggregated PE & VC. CA sources the data for the benchmarks directly from the quarterly unaudited and annual audited financial statements that private investment fund managers produce for their fund investors.

 

11 July – Canoe Intelligence and Lionpoint Group, a global consulting firm to the alternative investments industry, announced a partnership to design, deliver, and implement solutions that streamline alternative investment workflows for mutual clients. Lionpoint, whose clients include GPs, LPs, fund administrators, and family offices, acts as an extension of the client’s team during the process of implementing Canoe.

A few days earlier, Canoe announced another partnership with Apliqo, analytics platform for private market investors. Leveraging Canoe’s open APIs, data collected, categorized, extracted, and validated by Canoe will power downstream aggregation, portfolio management and reporting in Apliqo’s system for mutual clients.

These partnerships follow on Canoe’s recent expansion in Europe including the opening of their London office (see MFT Bulletin 2).

 

Plumb introduced a Bill Pay App, its proprietary technology to help streamline the bill payment process. Plumb was based in 1996 and specialises in outsourced accounting for the construction & real estate, manufacturing & distribution, e-commerce, professional services, and family office industries. It supports clients working with Sage 100, Sage 300, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and QuickBooks.

 

Backstop Solutions rebranded with a new logo “reflecting the fusion of Backstop Solutions Group and ION Analytics.” Backstop, a cloud-based software provider to the alternative and institutional investment community, was acquired by ION Analytics on December 28, 2021. ION Analytics is a global data and software company registered in London as I-Logic Technologies Bidco Limited.

 

New clients

 

Addepar’s new clients: Headquartered in Coral Gables, FL, and founded in 1981, Trivest Partners (c.$4.5B AuM) invests exclusively in founder-led and family-owned businesses in the lower middle market. F.L.Putnam Investment Management Company (c.$6.3B AuM) has provided investment management, financial planning, and consulting services to individuals, single and multi-family offices, endowments, foundations and other RIAs for nearly 40 years. Founded in 2019, Compound is a family office for tech employees and founders, built by engineers who understand QSBS, CFAs and APIs. Also founded in 2019, Pallas Capital Advisors provides comprehensive trust and estate strategies through financial modeling and investment solutions to HNW individuals and families, entertainers and athletes.

 

+SUBSCRIBE’s latest adopters include 7GC, a VC & PE technology investment boutique based in San Francisco, CA and Berlin, Germany, with funds domiciled in Luxembourg and Goldman Sachs Asset Management which will leverage the platform to help scale its alternatives platform in the third party wealth channel.

 

People news

 

17 July – Broadridge, a global fintech company, appointed Mike Sleightholme as president of Broadridge International. Mike’s experience includes CEO and General Manager at DST Systems, an SS&C Technologies business.

 

Asset Vantage have brought in Scott Trimble as executive director of institutional sales & customer success. Scott’s experience include 8 years as VP at SEI Family Office Services and roles at BNY Mellon, Adenza (formerly Calypso Technology), Ultimus LeverPoint Private Fund Solutions and Quantifi. 

 

Canoe appointed Mark Rossi as Senior Director of Business Development. Mark previously held roles at BNY Mellon’s Pershing, CAIS, Addepar, Advent and Charles Schwab.

 

PCR Financial Aggregation hired Jason Canella as director of sales. Jason’s experience includes positions at Bloomberg, JPMorgan and Premialab.

 

11 July – Foundation Source named Michael P. Beville as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and a member of the company’s executive team. He joins Foundation Source from Blackbaud, a provider of cloud software solutions for the social good industry, and brings a combination of nonprofit and technology experience, generating revenue growth, driving operations and leading teams.

 

6 July – SS&C Technologies appointed Brian Schell as Chief Financial Officer. He will report to Bill Stone, chairman and chief executive officer, and replace Patrick Pedonti who will be retiring at the end of the year, after 24 years with the firm. Mr. Schell is joining from Cboe Global Markets, where he was EVP, CFO, and treasurer. He has more than 30 years of experience at global financial institutions, including H&R Block, the FDIC, KPMG and JP Morgan. At Cboe, he managed several successful acquisitions and subsequent integrations. In related news, SS&C Technologies released its Q2 2023 figures and announced a $1 billion share buyback program. Q2 23 earnings were mixed, missing on EPS and beating on revenue.

 

Product updates

 

19 July – Ledgex, the creator of LedgexPro – a multi-asset class portfolio management and accounting solution for family offices and allocators, unveiled Ledgex DRS – its document retrieval service to automate tasks around private investments documentation. DRS leverages Azure, password manager and multi-factor authentication, accompanied by operational status updates for validation, and it is overseen by service analysts who liaise with custodians and private investment managers. The system elements are: document download and audit, document upload/transfer, document upload/transfer. Pricing is based on volume.

 

14 July – Trustate, a platform automating estate operations & trust funding for attorneys and wealth managers, introduced transparent subscription plans and new enhancements to its platform: refined dashboard navigation and task progress, improved estate operations workflow tools and digital vault, and customizable bank searches.

 

13 July – Arch shared several updates to the Arch user experience, listed below. Read more here.

1. Advanced Filtering to Better Understand Your Data
2. Updates to New User Roles and New User Activation 
3. Arch’s New Help Center

 

12 July – Alkymi launched Alpha, a generative AI solution built to get instant answers from documents and proprietary data sets. It supports over 25 file types and is able to generate answers in more than 95 languages. Use cases include responding to client queries, drafting internal investment memos, Investor due diligence and opportunity evaluation, RFP answers. Alpha packages some of the features Alkymi launched earlier this year, which we wrote about in MFT Bulletin 2. This development is part of a wider trend of firms adopting AI tools. Another example launched recently is Doc AI by Masttro.

Alkymi’s Alpha features include (also see this cool video in their blog): document chat, semantic search, summarization of documents, answer tool, and data repositories.

 

5 July 2023 – Luminary announced an integration with Addepar that syncs client profiles and entities in Luminary with existing Addepar portfolios, and connecting trust & estate plans with their asset values. Combined with Luminary’s Legacy Blueprint visualization tool, advisors can more easily quantify the impact of an estate plan, streamline estate planning reporting within Luminary, and create trust maps that help to differentiate between in-estate and out-of-estate assets (see demo screen shots at the link above).

 

Opto introduced new features: Allocation Builder to combine different asset classes and capital deployment schedules to create a desired private markets portfolio strategy, Factor Model for private asset performance that explains returns based on fundamental drivers and a new User Admin to manage client data access.

 

NEW! Thought leader insight 

 

This month, we’re sharing a comment from Raymond DiNunzio, partner at TOS Advisors, technology advisor and board member at several fintechs about the recent Bain & Company brief “Private Asset Investing Desperately Needs New Market Infrastructure“. Ray will be speaking at our conference on 8-9 November. 

“Financial sponsor firms are looking to go down market and broader in attracting new sources of capital for their investment funds. Retail clients and the firms that they work with are searching for ways to make this a more viable investment for their clients. This research piece by Bain & Company thoroughly addresses the market and how folks are trying to make this happen. An interesting part addressed is the desire to use alternative investments as collateral. Lending on alternatives is a real challenge for the industry in growing adoption and revenue sources for custodians and banks. The landscape for alternative investments will change significantly over the next 36-48 months, perhaps more so than in the past two decades. A great read by Thomas Olsen and his team that covers a lot of ground.”

 

 

P.S.

Lastly, a thought from us: Is AI killing our human ability to contemplate? This piece struck a chord, from Luke Burgis, an entrepreneur, educator and author of “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life”.