MFT Bulletin #3 - Family Office technology news roundup

Company updates 

28 June - Nevada's Financial Institutions Division seeks to impound assets of Prime Trust - a provider of financial infrastructure for crypto that owes clients over $156 million but only has half that amount left. A petition filed a few days earlier alleges that the custodian used customer funds to buy cryptocurrencies after losing access to digital wallets containing tens of millions of dollars in assets. The startup raised over $100M last year to expand its offering including wealth products for RIAs and banks. The company previously stored assets for companies like FTX, Binance.US and Celsius Network.

27 June - BDO USA, LLP implemented Fund Recs to streamline portions of its work related to the testing of investments. BDO is leveraging Fund Recs' Fusion module, a data transformation platform that enables business users to automate several data processes without the need for a developer. Fund Recs can help simplify downstream reconciliation processes by normalizing data sets into required formats.

26 June - Crystal Capital Partners, a private funds investment platform financial advisors, selected SS&C Advent’s Geneva to streamline portfolio management and reporting across more than 500 customized portfolios, and allow the company to scale. The integration is meant to eliminate burdensome processes such as subscriptions, rebalancing and liquidity schedules.

26 June - Dallas-based venture capital company Cypress Growth Capital announced it has invested $2 million in PFA Solutions, a Virginia-based provider of software solutions to private equity, venture capital, and other alternative asset management and investment firms. Founded in 2013, PFA offers a SaaS platform for complex compensation management, investor relations, and fund reporting. Its flagship product, FirmView, is an interactive, firmwide dashboard that allows investment firms to manage carried interest and compensation for the full life cycle of their funds, supporting employee co-investments and base, bonus, and other compensation arrangements on a fund and deal-by-deal basis.

26 June - First Rate partnered with BondIT to provide data-driven fixed income analysis and reporting solutions for the US wealth market. BondIT’s Scorable Credit Analytics leverages machine learning to predict the downgrade and upgrade probability of more than 3,000 rated corporate and financial issuers worldwide within a 12-month timeframe.

20 June - Proteus Capital partnered with Alpha Principle, a values-based RIA and asset management firm based in Englewood, to source and do due diligence on products for Alpha Principle’s clients, develop tailored investment strategies and provide aggregated reporting services for existing legacy private investments.

In related news, Ryan Laughon became president of Proteus. He is moving from SEI Family Office Services where he spent 17 years, most recently as president. Proteus, which counts amongst its ranks several former SEI FOS employees, was founded in 2012 by Jason Brown, who was also founder of Archway (acquired by SEI in 2017 and later rebranded to SEI Family Office Solutions).

June 14 - iCapital launched iCapital Marketplace to connect wealth managers to alternative investment opportunities. The marketplace offers distribution for asset managers with access, diligence, and analytics capabilities for wealth managers, advisors, and their clients. More than a dozen managers participated in the pre-launch of iCapital Marketplace, including Audax Private Debt, Blackstone, Carlyle, CrowdStreet Advisors, Fidelity, FS Investments, Henderson Park, John Hancock Investment Management, Kayne Anderson, Net Lease Capital, Partners Group, RedBird Capital Partners, Steele Creek Capital, and Sealy & Company. See commentary from Will Trout at Javelin Strategy and Research in this article.

June 13 - F2 Strategy acquired Oakbrook Solutions, leveraging majority investment of undisclosed amount from Renovus Capital, a private equity firm. The deal combines two well-known names in the wealth management and family office technology consulting and services space under the leadership of Doug Fritz, F2 Strategy’s Founder & CEO. The addition of Oakbrook’s 75-strong team quadruples F2 Strategy’s headcount, bolstering its bank trust domain experience and hands on implementation capacity. Craig Cook, the CEO of Oakbrook is joining F2 Strategy’s board of directors.

11 June - RIAs Balentine, Morton Wealth and NewEdge Wealth, and alternative asset managers JPM AM, PIMCO and Adams Street embraced the +SUBSCRIBE technology for private fund investor onboarding, subscription document processing, and order workflows to their UHNW clients and fund investors. +SUBSCRIBE provides institutional investors, fund managers, and service providers with an order management system for alternative investment product transactions. It says it has over 300 RIA clients.

7 June - Northern Trust launched A-Suite - a platform in which complex asset owners and allocators can access exclusive content, research and networking opportunities. The launch was announced by Melanie Zairis Pickett, head of asset owners, Americas, who launched Northern Trust’s Front Office Solutions in 2019.

June - Addepar welcomed new clients: Edinburgh-based private investment office North Capital and wealth managers: Indianapolis-based Sapient Capital, London-based GCW, Leo Wealth with offices in Asia and the US and Bellvue, WA-based Integrity Financial Corporation which lists technology as its core wealth management competency. 

23 May - AltExchange and Clear Sky Advisers, a decarbonisation focused fund manager, partnered to offer RIA and family office clients of Clear Sky the ability to provide private investment access, aggregate clients’ entire portfolio of alts and report on private investment performance. AltExchange aggregates and consolidates alternative investments.

People moves

After 15 years at the helm, Edouard Thijssen, Trusted Family's Co-founder & CEO, transitioned out. Edgar du Colombier, who is joining the firm to replace him as the new CEO. Trusted Family works with family businesses and family offices in over 30 countries. On his LinkedIn profile, Thijssen, who will remain closely involved during the handover, offered some context. “Over the last 2 years, we have been working on a new product that we are launching very soon. Together with the launch of our new platform, it’s the right time to bring new energy and fresh perspectives to lead the company to the next level! We are building the 2nd generation of the company for scale.”

Citywire RIA reported that Ed Swenson and Austin Philbin were leaving Dynasty Financial Partners. Swenson was Dynasty’s COO and co-founder, and its top executive after chief executive Shirl Penney. Philbin was chief client officer at the RIA middle and back-office service provider. A few days later news surfaced that Swenson joined Advisor Group to develop a corporate RIA platform for fee-based advisors.

Mirador promoted Nikhil Deusana to chief product officer role. Deusana joined Mirador in 2020. He is credited with creating the firm’s advisor-client portal Gateway, helping to launch the wealth management middle office services practice, establish an office in Naperville, IL, and customize the firm’s Salesforce platform. Prior to Mirador, Deusana was director of operations at Cresset.

SEI appointed Sneha Shah as EVP and head of new business ventures, reporting to CEO Ryan Hicke. In this newly created role, she will lead new business and platform identification and incubation, engage clients, accelerators, and the entrepreneurial community to invest in and accelerate new ideas and solutions, and cultivate innovation that drives top-line growth.

Cresset named Mark Rogozinski as head of family office services. Rogozinski has previous experience as CEO of Asset Vantage, President of RockIT Solutions - the Rockefeller & Co technology and back-office platform, and COO of Homrich Berg.

Certuity, a multi-family office, appointed Mariia Eroshin as managing director, family office, foundations and endowments. Ms. Eroshin brings over 20 years of broad experience including in family office operations, finance and accounting, and technology, amongst other family office service areas.

FA Solutions - London-based portfolio management solution for fund managers, private banks, robo advisors, and family offices - brought in Peter Dingomal as business development director. 

Alkymi welcomed Jason Yantz and Bill Melton as strategic accounts directors. They also have a new website: https://www.alkymi.io/

Product updates

iPaladin has been granted a second patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patent No. 11,631,051 entitled “Data Processing System and Method for Managing Enterprise Information”, extending their commitment to the "normalization and regulation of information, access and activity to optimize collaborative productivity". iPaladin’s family office digital operating system seamlessly administers communications, workflow, archiving, scheduling and follow up. This patent reflects iPaladin’s ongoing efforts to increase transparency, efficiency and control within family offices.

Addepar introduced enhanced, customizable charts, a feature that enables firms to track portal usage and the option to make 2FA mandatory for their firm’s users and/or portal contacts. There is now also an EMEA Addepar Pro community. See more here.

Masttro launched a new feature 'Doc AI' for alternative investment data processing! It automates data handling of capital calls, distributions, and capital statements by synthesizing unstructured data. Users can drag and drop their documents into the platform for analysis by the machine learning technology and then review the extracted data. The documents are stored directly in their Masttro instance, making them searchable anywhere on the platform.

Entole is now integrated with Addepar. The connection syncs holdings, transactions, and reports from Addepar to the Entole Family Office Command Center. In other updates, Entole recently implemented Auth0 by Okta to authenticate and authorize users across their applications and clients’ internal infrastructure with a single sign-on (SSO). It also added family connection and education features, including: family news with timeline; family member investment risk tracking, by family, household, or individual; timeline of family goals and status; beneficiary dashboard and enhanced chat feature.

FundCount launched 'Family Office KPI assessment tool' - a complimentary service to families, family offices, and asset managers who want to understand their KPIs and compare to industry benchmarks. The assessment has 46 questions divided into 10 categories of business challenges in family reporting and financial control. A tailored report is provided immediately.

Altoo joined the bLink community to make its onboarding experience more client-friendly with bLink connected custodians, and to take advantage of the standardized protocols for transaction data to improve overall efficiency. Developed by SIX, bLink describes itself as “the pioneering link to Open Banking in Switzerland.” In other updates, Altoo recently implemented Xorlab’s email security tool as an extra layer of defense against cyber attacks. Read the case study here.

Orca has a new feature that allows you to enter 4 types of values: market value, book value, tax value & insurance value. Users can blend any type of value into the structure chart and aggregate any type of value in the wealth panel. Orca was featured in the recent Tech-NEW-logy session in association with MyFoTech.

Luminary, a collaboration platform for trust & estate planning, introduced Legacy Blueprint - new feature that allows users to create visualizations for complex trust details and make connections between different entities and beneficiaries in an estate plan, streamlining the wealth advisor-attorney engagement.

Dynamo improved its mobile app and introduced new features to its portfolio monitoring & valuation module to help evaluate portfolio companies. 

Watching

Asora - on a mission is to be "the family office solution of choice for wealth owners globally"

K1x  (see also our K-1 Hell session with the Tech-NEW-logy Institute)

P.S.

AI threats: Deepfake kidnapping extortion plots