WhiteTower Capital Management
Background
“FundFormer is a gamechanger. In addition to trimming at least two weeks off our investor onboarding time, there’s a certain sense of security knowing that the FundFormer team is led by attorneys with deep legal backgrounds. This is extremely important to us because they’re taking our PPMs and our subscription documents and reconfiguring them from a legal framework into a usable document that's now online and clickable. We could never get that level of detail or functionality with our previous solution. And given how affordable it is, it’s really a no-brainer for us.”
Bob Griffin
Principal & Director of Business Development, WhiteTower Capital Management
The Challenge
Archaic pdf and email-based fund subscription process
End-of-month scrambling to get documents finalized
No transparency into investor onboarding process
WhiteTower Capital Management is an investment firm focused on digital assets. Led by a group of veteran financial technology professionals, the firm was keenly aware that its paper- and PDF-based fund subscription process was, as they put it, “wonky at best, arduous at worst.”
Bob Griffin, Principal & Director of Business Development at WhiteTower Capital Management, recalled: “We only take new limited partners on the first of every month, so we’d send out our PPMs and subscription docs the first week of the month. But there was no transparency. We couldn’t see where anyone was in the process. That meant it was always a scramble at the end of the month to get those documents in." Griffin continued, “As a crypto fund, we’re already on the cutting edge of technology, so we wanted a high-tech solution to streamline this archaic process of emailing PDFs back-and-forth with investors and prospects.” The search was on…
The Solution
A “super simple,” “white glove treatment” implementation that took less than three weeks
Drastic reduction in investor onboarding time
More time to prospect, trade, train, analyze investments, and help CIO work on portfolios
“We started looking for solutions,” said Griffin, “but nothing came across our plate that had the capabilities we required.
What we really needed was a capable point of contact that could execute and facilitate our investor onboarding process via a technology solution that was intuitive and easy to use for us and our LPs. Then our fund administrator told us about FundFormer’s electronic fund subscription platform, and it was like a revelation. I thought, ‘My gosh! I didn’t know this existed. Why hasn’t this existed before?’ So the decision to go with FundFormer was an easy one for us.”
After a “super simple,” “white glove treatment” implementation, WhiteTower was up and running in less than three weeks, and it didn’t take long for the fund to see results. FundFormer helped WhiteTower drastically reduce investor onboarding time by using conditional logic to convert the fund’s manual forms to SmartForms, or digital subscription documents, and saving investor data for auto-populating future subscription documents.
Griffin again: “Our old onboarding process was really LP-dependent. In best-case scenarios, which rarely happened, it was about a two-week process from start to finish. But our ‘typical’ process was three-plus weeks. Today, with FundFormer, that process is typically less than a week, and everything is much simpler. Our clients really like how they can just click through an intuitive interface that tells them where to look and why they’re looking there. No more hunting and pecking for things they should care about and sign. No more emailing back and forth. And for us, no more wondering where clients are in the process because we can see when they click the link for each document and how far they’ve gotten. It really helps speed up the process.”
With that fully digital subscription experience in place, the WhiteTower team gained greater transparency into its progress toward fundraising goals. It also had additional time to focus on more important tasks.
Griffin recalled, “As entrepreneurs, we have to wear many hats. FundFormer made it easier for us to do that. Adding new funds to the platform has been very quick and easy, and now that I’m no longer hand-holding clients through the onboarding process, I’m free to spend more time prospecting, trading, training, analyzing investments, and helping my CIO work on our portfolios. I get to eliminate all that back office stuff and wear all those other hats.”
