Recent developments in the Family Office technology world

Company updates

3 Jan - Allvue Systems announced the appointment of Marc Scheipe as CEO. He replaced Dan Streetman, who stepped down from his position as CEO due to personal reasons. Allvue serves the needs of alternative asset investors; its solution for family offices includes accounting and investment management software. The company was established in 2019 through the merger of Black Mountain Systems and AltaReturn.

18 Jan - First Rate, Dallas-based data aggregation, performance and reporting provider to wealth managers, acquired Finantech SpA, a Chilean based wealthtech that offers reporting solutions to family offices and private banks. Finantech will continue to offer its data aggregation and performance reporting solutions locally to clients while incorporating many of First Rate’s machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions. First Rate Ventures, the investment subsidiary of First Rate, Inc. continues to explore opportunities in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America.

27 Jan - Alkymi partnered with Ledgex by bringing together Alkymi’s data workflow automation and the Ledgex Pro multi-asset class portfolio management and accounting solution. The partnership aims to simplify the problem of cumbersome data management and waves of client statements and capital notices arriving in documents via emails and in portals, and to improve data timelines and accuracy for client reporting, risk management, and front-office decision making. The partnership comes on the heels of Alkymi’s $21M series A funding completed in October 2022 to develop its workflow automation solution. In recent personnel changes, Ledgex appointed Nicole Eberhardt as CEO and Wendy McCoy as chief strategy officer.

1 Feb - Mirador opened an office in Edinburgh, UK in a continued effort to best serve its non-US clients. Since 2015, Mirador has grown to five office locations in the US and also an office in Dublin, Ireland, which houses certain technical resources. Mirador provides performance reporting, middle office services, and technology solutions and products for U/HNW investment portfolios.

6 Feb - Eton Solutions selected Singapore for its international headquarters and launched new Administrative Family Office (AFO) Solution. While the Americas region will retain its primary focus, Eton Solutions’ international headquarters in Singapore will enable the organisation to streamline its access and support to international markets. Eton’s AFO Solution harnesses the company’s integrated AtlasFive software platform and supporting services into a single solution covering investment reporting, accounting, document management and tax support services. It is aimed at family offices within the US$100 to US$500 million of assets under management, that “want access to cutting-edge technology like AtlasFive but may not have the resources or time to implement such a comprehensive platform.” Family offices can choose from three AFO collaboration models. Standard features are: core accounting and reporting, transaction processing, interactive dashboards, best-practice workflows, a mobile application and a virtual mailroom. This news comes on the back of Eton’s Series C funding round in December 2022- anchored by new investor Navis Capital Partners - that raised $38M. 

8 Feb - Canoe Intelligence announced the completion of its $25M Series B financing round led by F-Prime Capital with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and other strategic investors. This funding will be used to accelerate expansion into European markets, grow the team, enhance enterprise product offerings, develop new data products, and continue to strengthen Canoe's core technology that automates manual workflows related to alternative investment document and data management, extraction and delivery. In recent personnel changes, Canoe brought in Aman Kumar Soni as vice president of data strategy. Aman is based in London, where the firm has just opened its first office outside of New York. 

9 Feb - William Blair, investment bank and financial services firm, partnered with wealthtech InvestCloud to launch SYSTM Wealth Solutions - a cloud-based platform for wealth advisors. The first function to go live is SYSTM Marketplace - a curated menu of investments and financial products sourced from asset managers across multiple strategies and sectors. SYSTM’s partners include Halo Investing, Morningstar, Citi Alliance and +Subscribe - electronic subscription document technology and order management system for alternative product transactions.

14 Feb - London-based Landytech announced it has secured $12M in Series B funding, led by an investment from Aquiline Technology Growth and additional investment from existing investor Adelie Capital. The funding will support international expansion and the development of Landytech’s platform, Sesame - an investment consolidation and reporting platform.

14 Feb - Luminary, a New York-based startup trust & estate collaboration platform, announced that it raised $9.5mm in capital led by 8VC, along with VCs and strategic investors including Fin Capital, Focus Financial Partners, Rockefeller Asset Management Technology Ventures Group, and several family offices. Luminary was founded in 2022 by a team with experience in wealth management and software building. See more from 8VC, the lead investor here.

22 Feb - Dynasty Financial selected BridgeFT as primary data aggregation provider. As part of the deal, Dynasty and its affiliates acquired a minority stake in BridgeFT and appointed its chief technology officer, Frank Coates, to serve on the fintech’s board. BridgeFT’s WealthTech API is a platform offering a single, open API to trade-ready, multi-custodial data, analytics, and applications, removing the need for individual data feeds from a range of custodians and back-office providers. Dynasty’s platform serves 49 registered investment advisors and $72 billion in assets. Less than a week earlier Dynasty announced it would acquire TruClarity’s technology assets that help advisors transition to independence.

Feb - Private Wealth Systems, portfolio management and reporting software, brought Charles Brown as director of sales.

1 March - Amplify Advisory, consulting and services firm for family offices, RIAs, endowments and foundations, appointed three new partners to its multilingual team. Two of the new appointees, Valentin and Hektor Dhima, are joining from Addepar. 

6 March - Addepar, portfolio aggregation and reporting platform, opened a new office in Pune. Establishing a presence in India will enable the company to increase its investments in research and development (R&D) and support an increasingly global client base. This expansion follows Addepar’s most recent office opening in London and brings the number of its global offices to seven, including Mountain View, New York City, Salt Lake City, Edinburgh and Chicago. In personnel changes, Addepar recently appointed John Wiseman as chief revenue officer. 

9 March - Masttro raised $43 million in its first official capital raise. The funding round was led by FTV Capital and included Citi Ventures. The capital will be used to fund research and development of new features on the platform using data and artificial intelligence, as well as to build out the go-to-market teams. Masttro aggregates, analyzes and reports the client’s total net worth. 

9 March - BILL partnered with BMO to create BMO Bill Connect - a bill pay and invoicing platform that helps to digitize and streamline business payments. BILL is a financial automation software for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that helps manage financial workflows, including payables, receivables, and spend and expense management.

9 March - Proteus Capital launched Employee Access Solution for private fund sponsors. This solution will allow sponsors of private funds to engage employees in the benefits of their investment products with streamlined efficiency with the view of attracting and retaining talent. Proteus is a solutions provider for participants in private investment transactions.

16 March - leafplanner, SaaS platform to organize, map, and share information about a family and family enterprise, announced the appointment of Jonathan M. Ruga, CEO of Sentry Financial, to its Board of Directors. Sentry Financial is a commercial finance company which led an investment round in leafplanner. The amount was not disclosed.

22 March - J.P. Morgan announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Aumni, a provider of investment analytics software to the venture capital industry. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed and closing is expected in the first half of 2023. Founded in 2018, Aumni’s proprietary data analytics engine structures, tracks and analyzes legal and economic terms underpinning growth-stage private market transactions.

28 March - AltExchange, a fintech company digitizing alternative investments, launched a Digital Custodian Platform for asset managers with the aim to remove friction and administrative barriers for RIAs and their clients with features like: one login for all clients’ alternative investments, extracted and structured data from PDFs and online portals, performance reporting, automated tax document collection (K-1s and 1099s), direct reporting to TAMPS, open architecture approach (keep existing systems), ability to bill on alts, and the option for a fully-managed solution (software + service).

March - Harmonate appointed Rick Barkley as Chief Technology Officer. Harmonate’s technology, Conductor, automates mid and back office operational workflows for the alternative asset industry including: fund administrators, institutional investors, capital allocators, asset servicing firms, and wealth managers.

Product updates 

Venn by Two Sigma, portfolio analytics platform for professional investors, introduced new feature designed to support private asset analysis. By looking at infrequent and smoothed private asset performance and appropriate public market proxies, Venn’s desmoothing option aims to reduce private market performance lag and mark it to market. In addition, Venn’s existing interpolation functionality aims to increase the frequency of private market returns by utilizing a relevant public market proxy to create an approximated daily return stream for the private asset. This process enables allocators to quickly convert quarterly private asset returns into a daily return series that resembles a marked-to-market public return stream.

SEI Family Office Services introduced the Archway Platform’s report composer tool to complement the platform’s existing suite of reporting tools. It allows users to create custom data views using drag-and-drop fields, user-defined grouping options, flexible sorting mechanisms, and comprehensive filters. SEI FOS provides accounting, investment management and reporting technology and services.

SS&C's Black Diamond Wealth Platform expanded financial planning capabilities with RightCapital collaboration. This two-way integration pulls key financial planning data from RightCapital into Black Diamond's platform as account and portfolio information flow from Black Diamond to RightCapital. Black Diamond is a portfolio management, reporting, trading and rebalancing platform.

Addepar introduced a new test and development environment, Sandbox, for clients to test workflows, iterate on custom and partner integrations and try or test changes before implementing them into production. Recent Addepar integrations include: Vanilla, Opto Investments and VRGL.

Envestnet Tamarac have made improvements to their committed capital reporting for alternative investments and to the rebalanced summary report in the trading module.

Newcomers on our radar 

Copia Wealth Studios - financial intelligence platform for complex portfolios. Video intro.

SumIt - sending a liferaft to save accountants from a sea of spreadsheets.

P.S.

The AI Dilemma: here’s a fascinating conversation by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin at the Center of Humane Technology about the risks and harms of GPT-4 and why all content-based verification breaks this year.