Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Meredith Moss, Founder and CEO of Finomial, discussing the automation of client on-boarding and the client lifecycle management platform.

“I saw that the process of investing in alternative funds was incredibly manual. And it was shocking to me that this state of play with paper forms, and photocopied supporting documents and scans and faxes were considered perfectly acceptable.”

“Private equity funds and hedge funds need to make sure they’re bringing investors on in a way that’s compliant with a boatload of regulations.”

“What we found is that the reason the market was so manual and so paper driven was not because there wasn’t a trading platform, but because there’s so many requirements on the industry, and on how funds interact with their investors.”

“We started in the cloud. We’ve always been a SaaS business. We’re not in a position like other software providers in the industry of trying to sort of retrofit a deployed solution into the cloud.”

“Finomial takes the opposite approach, which is that we embrace [different managers’] forms as they are, these are limited partnership agreements. They look like a 50 to 100 page questionnaire. But it’s a legal agreement at the end of the day. So Finomial embraces that agreement, we wrap our software and our data model around it, and then enable the process to be completed interactively.”

“One of the persistent questions in the industry is, ‘Will we ever get to a fully electronic process?’ I have a untraditional view on that, which is that the answer is no.”

“Another scenario that pretty compelling for larger fund managers is those managers are multi-admin, meaning they’ve selected a particular fund administrator for a long-short strategy, and another for a more complex debt structure. And what they want to offer is a single experience to their investors across those different funds.”

“There’s a real ability to collaborate. So that if there is an outside counsel that needs to be involved, or an RIA is bringing in a number of ultra-high net worth clients, everyone has the same view of the process. Everyone can touch the process in the way that’s appropriate to their role. And that accelerates the time from initial subscription and sent out to the close of the investment.”

“We see ourselves as fitting into a larger landscape of RegTech, which is all the regulations.”

“You will always have smart financial engineers looking for alpha in ways that are based on unique insights and creative structuring. But at the same time, we want to make markets fair and transparent.”

“I do think that there’s a continued drive to outsourcing. And the question will be, to what extent is that middle and back office outsourced to a service provider versus to technology.”