FOTechHub Bulletin: Family Office Technology News Roundup – March, 2024

Company News

 

iCapital Acquires Mirador to Enhance Data Management and Reporting: Mirador has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by iCapital. With the acquisition, iCapital will expand its data management and reporting capabilities to create an enhanced technology experience for clients in the wealth management, family office, endowment, and foundation. As part of the transaction, over 180 employees of Mirador are expected to join iCapital. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The Raymond James Technology & Services Investment Banking team advised Mirador in this deal. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Goodwin Proctor LLP served as advisors to iCapital.

Mirador, a portfolio company of Aquiline Capital Partners, was founded in 2015 and today has offices in Stamford, CT, Chicago, IL, Jacksonville, FL, Salt Lake City, UT, Edinburgh, Scotland and London, England. Its offerings include consolidated financial reporting, private investment support, offline and alternative investment data management, K-1 document management, and compensation management for wealth management firms. Mirador also has a technology consulting team offering custom wealth technology solutions. Founded in 2013, iCapital streamlines the complex process of private market investing, offering a range of tools for education, transactions, data flows, analytics, and client support throughout the investment lifecycle. It has $180.9 billion in global platform assets, 1200 people and 13 offices worldwide. 

 

Strategic Expansion and Leadership Transition at PCR: Alex Valdez joined Private Client Resources (PCR) as the new director of business development, transitioning from his previous position as executive director at Masttro. Valdez brings a wealth of experience from notable stints at Credit Suisse and JP Morgan. PCR is currently expanding its team, actively recruiting for various positions in Mumbai, one of which is a recruiter role aimed to grow the HR team that spans the US, Netherlands, and India. This recruitment drive follows the appointment of Ranjan Mishra as the new CEO of PCR, succeeding Bob Miller who has been in the role since 2019. Mishra brings his expertise from Viteos, where he led the UK operations and private equity services, and later assumed a leadership position at Intertrust after Viteos was acquired. Founded in the early 2000s, PCR received a significant investment from Public Pension Capital in 2019. The company started as a provider of reporting solutions for family offices and has since expanded into a comprehensive data-sharing platform that connects to various banks, custodians, and fund managers. Its client base spans 290 firms including global private banks, advisors, wealthy families, and wealth-tech firms.

SEI Backs TIFIN with $10 Million Investment to harness artificial intelligence (AI) in wealth management, enhancing client experiences and business growth. This strategic partnership focuses on rapid solution delivery, market innovation, and talent development. SEI is joining other backers of TIFIN, including: JP Morgan, Morningstar, Hamilton Lane, Franklin Templeton, Motive Partners, and Broadridge. TIFIN Give, one of TIFIN’s eight portfolio companies, recently acquired Giving Place. 

 

F2 Strategy Acquires Sky Marketing to Bolster Wealth Management Offering: RIA technology consultancy F2 Strategy acquired the full-service wealth management marketing agency Sky Marketing Consultants, integrating Sky’s co-founder Jeremy Jackson as the new chief marketing officer. This acquisition, finalized last month, enhances F2’s service offering to include marketing services for its clients. F2 Strategy recently qadrupled its staff wiht the acquisition of Oakbrook Solutions following a capital investment from the private equity firm Renovus Capital Partners. 

 

InvestCloud Execs Exit in Second Shake-Up in Two Years: InvestCloud, a private equity-backed RIA technology firm, is undergoing its second executive reorganization in two years, leading to the departure of several longtime executives. According to an internal memo viewed by Citywire, InvestCloud’s CEO Jeff Yabuki announced the exit of Pete Hess, Chief Revenue Officer for the Americas, and Frederick Duden, Chief Product Officer of APL, InvestCloud’s portfolio management, accounting and trading business. Hess is set to pursue other opportunities, with his direct reports now reporting to Chief Revenue Officer Shawn Donovan. Some of Duden’s responsibilities will be absorbed by Chief Operating Officer Nicole Nakashian. The company has enlisted McKinsey to aid in the reorganization effort. See more color on the story from Oisin Breen at RIABiz.

 

Canoe’s New Data Platform: Canoe Intelligence introduced Canoe Asset Data, a product developed in partnership with 13 clients to enhance access to data for front-office decision-making and alternative investment allocation. It automates and streamlines the extraction, standardization, and delivery of detailed asset-level data, sourced directly from General Partners’ documents. The product aims to provide users with deeper insights for tasks like exposure, portfolio analysis, risk monitoring and due diligence, leveraging key features: holdings summary, operating metrics for underlying assets, valuations, static data points like industry and geography, and transaction attribution. Canoe Asset Data is the first product release from the Canoe Data Innovation Hub, which kicked off in October 2023 with the Canoe Asset Data Design Partnership. See more and examples of uses here. 

 

DataSnipper Secures $100M Series B Funding, Hits $1 Billion Valuation: DataSnipper, an intelligent automation platform for audit and finance professionals, announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures, reaching a valuation of $1 billion. This investment supports DataSnipper’s mission to empower auditors with AI and expand across new verticals including internal auditors, tax advisors, forensic accountants, and other sectors involving data reconciliation. The company, which serves over 400,000 auditors worldwide, including major accounting firms, plans to use the funds also to enhance product offerings, particularly its Cloud Collaboration and AI Suites​. It recently introduced Advanced Extraction Suite to help eliminate manual typing data from a large volume of documents. The solution automatically detects and extracts the required data from invoices, receipts and contracts.

 

SS&C Technologies Boosts Middle East Operations: SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. expanded its fund administration business in the UAE with a new office in Abu Dhabi, following regulatory approval by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA). This move strengthens SS&C’s presence in the Middle East, offering end-to-end fund administration services from the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) location. Katarzyna Lupa-Nowicka (Head of Private Markets Operations, Middle East) and David Forrester (Head of Hedge Operations, Middle East) will lead the new office. In other news, SS&C Technologies added Crystal Capital Partners as a client for its fund admin services. Crystal is an alternatives platform Crystal’s platform connecting over 200 wealth management firms to approximately 60 third-party institutional private funds.

 

 

Partnerships and Product Updates

 

Luminary’s New Estate Tools Unleashed: Luminary rolled out new features for its trust and estate platform. Presentation Builder automates the manual process of creating custom branded, comprehensive and customisable estate planning presentations for clients, including the following content: estate overview and entity details, estate waterfalls, and overview of the client’s professional team. Luminary’s new modeling tool for illustrating hypothetical changes to estate plans enables the creation of “what if” scenarios, such as new gifts, liquidity events or changes in trust terms, providing a visual comparison of proposed changes against current plans.

 

Ledgex Enhances Family Office Finance with Plaid: Ledgex has integrated Plaid into its financial management solutions for family offices. This integration allows real-time financial data access from various investments and accounts, backed by Plaid’s security protocols. It aims to reduce manual entry errors and improve portfolio management, security, accounting processes, and reporting.

 

Xero Enhances US Customer Experience with BILL Partnership: Xero has partnered with BILL to introduce bill payment capabilities to its US customers. This collaboration aims to simplify bill payments for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) by embedding BILL’s solution into the Xero platform, allowing for transactions without leaving Xero. The partnership offers streamlined processes for paying bills, reconciling transactions, and providing greater control over cash flow, utilizing BILL’s network of 5.8 million members for easy vendor payments. 

 

Vanilla Launches Vanilla Scenarios™ for Estate Planning: Vanilla, another trust & estate platform, is introducing Vanilla Scenarios™, a new tool for interactive estate planning to enable advisors to dynamically model and compare various planning strategies.  Initial scenarios including GRATs, SLATs, ILITS, and QPRTs will be rolling out to customers in the coming weeks, with plans to expand. The tool will allow for the customization and visualization of changes such as state residency, sale of a large assets or beneficiary changes, and provide clients with recommendations. Vanilla also recently partnered with Deviate Consulting which selected it as a platform of choice to integrate into Deviate clients’ tech stack. In January, Vanilla and Vanguard expanded their partnership, offering Vanilla’s platform to Vanguard’s UHNW Personal Advisor Wealth Management clients.

 

Vyzer Partnerships: Vyzer, a wealth management platform from Israel for private investors with complex portfolios, has formed a partnership with Akoya, an API-based data access network, to improve financial data security and accessibility. Through Akoya’s network, which is linked to over 4,500 financial institutions, this collaboration allows for consumer-authorized data sharing, removing the necessity to share sensitive login details. Vyzer also recently enhanced its connectivity with Fidelity Investments, moving away from screen scraping to a direct link via OAuth-based connection.

 

WealthArc and ZeroLink Unveil AI & Analytics Service: WealthArc partnered with ZeroLink to create WealthArc AI & Analytics, a new “chat with your data” service designed for family offices and the wealth management sector. This collaboration leverages ZeroLink’s neurosymbolic AI technology to offer advanced data analysis and management capabilities. WealthArc’s platform, which aggregates data from over 200,000 positions globally every day, aims to transform how wealth data is interacted with. Kluz Ventures, backing both companies, sees its CEO Artur Kluz also chairing WealthArc. *

 

AMPLIFY Officially Partners with Addepar: AMPLIFY announced a partnership with Addepar, leveraging their data platform for workflows and processes: investment data aggregation, consolidated reporting, performance calculation audit and analysis, liquidity forecasting, and trading and rebalancing. Led by ex-Addepar solutions experts and seasoned professionals, Amplify serves its clients as a strategic operating partner. 

 

AltExchange & Juniper Square Team Up: The partnership is aimed to streamline how investment managers and advisors exchange data, enhancing access to exclusive investment opportunities and simplifying reporting. AltExchange automates the back-office management of private investments and Juniper Square is a platform offering fundraising, investor operations and fund administration to some 1800 GPs. *

 

Orion and CAIS Forge Alliance: Orion and CAIS have partnered to give Orion’s Wealth Advisory and OCIO clients access to CAIS’ alternative investment platform, including private equity, debt, real estate, and hedge funds. The partnership will also introduce streamlined investment processes and educational resources to Orion’s advisors, leveraging CAIS’ proprietary education platform.

 

K1x Rolls Out a Suite of Updates: K1x introduced several enhancements, including a new Excel-based K-1 Executive Summary that highlights the most important tax data elements; state K-1 reading providing taxable income allocations for all 42 taxing jurisdictions and an Excel export of the entire state K-1 for 10 states; more comprehensive e-filing capabilities; a new Tenant Level Master K-1 for easier tax data management across multiple legal entities, and improved foreign disclosure footnote extractions. Additionally, they’ve enhanced package printing for a more streamlined tax compliance process for accounting firms. 

 

NODE40 & SoftLedger’s Solution for Digital Asset Accounting for SMEs: NODE40 has formed a partnership with SoftLedger to integrate its digital asset data within the accounting services SoftLedger provides to its clientele. This collaboration, powered by NODE40’s publicly available API, offers a unified platform for managing both digital and traditional finances. NODE40 provides compliant digital asset reporting, ranging from balance sheet summaries to detailed transaction level audit trails while SoftLedger offers an accounting platform for for small and medium enterprises that “have outgrown Quickbooks or Xero, and are seeking an alternative to Sage Intacct and Oracle Netsuite”. 

 

Altoo and Divizend Unveil Dividend Forecasting: Altoo AG and Divizend GmbH announced their collaboration to launch an automated dividend payment forecasting feature on the Altoo wealth management Platform. This feature aims to assist clients in optimizing future cash flow and liquidity assessments and liquidity by automatically predicting dividend payments for all holdings. Both companies are members of the Swiss OpenWealth Association that aims to connect financial institutions and wealthtechs to define and operationalize global API standards. The Munich-based Divizend has a dividend database of some 20,000 dividend stocks.

 

Addepar & ORCA Announce Integration: Addepar formally announced its integration with ORCA, syncing ownership and valuations information between the systems. ORCA uses this data to create dynamic structure charts that can be enriched with legal, tax, and compliance data. See a Tech-NEW-logy interview with Tomas Hurcik, Orca’s co-founder & CEO here.

 

 

Moving and Grooving

 

Addepar’s new CTO: Addepar has appointed Bob Pisani as Chief Technology Officer. Pisani joined Addepar in 2020 to head Addepar’s Platform Engineering, where he built and managed the teams driving Addepar’s data, compute, and AI developments. Pisani replaces Ruchir Swarup who was hired by KKR as Chief Information Officer. 

 

First Rate Appoints April Rudin to Board of Advisors: First Rate, a reporting and compliance provider for the wealth management industry, has appointed April Rudin, CEO of The Rudin Group, to its board of advisors. Rudin brings her expertise in marketing strategy to support First Rate’s position in the evolving wealth management industry and elevate First Rate’s brand among RIAs, asset managers, and family offices.. First Rate’s services include data aggregation, performance calculation, client reporting, and intelligent data analytics. 

 

Moonfare’s New CIO: Moonfare, the Berlin-based digital PE/VC investment platform, promoted Sanjay Gupta to chief investment officer role. The previous CIO, Mangus Grufman, “is set to lead a bold transformation“. 

 

Opto Investments Elevates Co-Founders and Rolls Out New Features: Opto Investments, the private markets wealthtech platform, has promoted its co-founders to key leadership roles and introduced enhancements to its product offerings. Jake Miller has been named Chief Solutions Officer, and Matt Reed has taken on the role of Chief Technology Officer. The company also rolled out new platform features, including a CIO toolkit for data-driven client analyses, custom fund creation and management capabilities, and pre-trade analysis tools.

 

Portfolio BI Names Jonathan White as New CEO: Portfolio BI announced that Jonathan White has been appointed as the new chief executive officer and that Jeremy Siegel has agreed to step down as CEO following a five-year tenure. White was previosuly head of business development at Viteos Funds Services North America and joined Intertrust in a leadership role following the acquisition of Viteos. Portfolio BI provides software and software and managed service platform (MSP) to 150 hedge funds, asset managers, family offices, funds of funds, and institutional investors.

 

Foundation Source Expands Leadership with Fintech Expert: Foundation Source, a provider of cloud-based solutions for private foundations and planned giving, appointed Mark Casady to its board of directors. Casady is former LPL Financial CEO and founder of Vestigo Ventures and, which invested in Foundation Source in conjunction with the firm’s February 2024 acquisition of PG Calc. In November 2023, the firm appointed industry veterans Pamela Norley, former president of Fidelity Charitable, and Charles (Chip) Roame, founder and managing partner of Tiburon Strategic Advisors and Tiburon CEO Summits, to its board of directors. These developments follow Foundation Source’s transition to a GTCR portfolio company in September 2023.