Letter from the Founder
The following has been written with the hope that future and prospective employees, clients and investors read this to better understand our purpose and ethos.
Allow me to introduce myself
My name is Matt. I am an adventure-seeking CPA who loves to build things and solve real-world problems. I grew up in a small middle-class industrial city in Ontario, Canada. It’s a community-oriented place with lots of love. I went off to college, or university as we call it back home, to earn a business degree. After that, I earned my CPA designation.
I have spent my entire career in client service starting with public accounting before moving into fund administration. Believe it or not, I love client service and fund admin.
State of the industry
Over my career, I’ve learned a lot of technical aspects of the alternative investment space and the business of client service and I’m excited to incorporate what I’ve learned into what we’re building at Vector.
Client service
Client service, especially for accounting-heavy services, is outdated. Most firms treat their employees like they are a commodity where they have insulting PTO policies; compensation packages that neither reward hard work nor align incentives; and they do not respect their employees’ time.
As our knowledge-based economy evolves, this approach is no longer competitive. There is a massive difference between great accountants and average accountants where companies need to compete for those great accountants.
Software is eating the world
Today, every company needs to be a tech company or they will eventually face disruption. Unfortunately, the alternative investment space has an abhorrent software environment, especially its accounting systems. Most of these systems are not purpose-built for partnerships and, instead, are built on top of a legacy ERP systems or are simply API’s into off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions. You can forget about API functionality.
Most solutions (e.g. investor portals, CRM’s, portfolio monitoring solutions, etc.) are fragmented, confusing, do not speak with each other, have multiple logins, poor reporting functionality and worse. If you have spent any time in the industry, I’m sure this resonates with you.
Stakeholder experience
Because of this fragmented software environment there is an unnecessary amount of friction between stakeholders.
Fund managers can’t monitor their portfolios effectively or bring investors into their vehicles efficiently. Investors must deal with confusing portals and antiquated methods of subscribing into funds. Portfolio companies have to share the same documents and KPI’s over and over with their cap table. Other service providers are left sending Excel files back and forth with no holy grail “single source of truth”.
What we’re doing about it
Enter Vector AIS (Alternative Investment Services). Vector’s mission is to reduce the friction between stakeholders in the alternative investment space. Phase 1 of this vision is fund administration but is by no means the end goal. We define stakeholders as anyone who has a vested interest in the operations of a fund. Obvious examples are fund managers, investors and portfolio investments but we go beyond that to include other service providers as well.
From day one, Vector has been a technology company. We are investing heavily in software development and design to increase efficiencies for our team and to bring a suite of innovative value-added products and services to our clients and their stakeholders. We believe we have the most exciting software roadmap in the fund admin industry.
In the near term, we will be building out our technology suite and service offerings to bring value added products to our fund managers and their service providers. Think portfolio monitoring, subscription document processing , AML/KYC and much more. Be on the lookout for partnership announcements in the near future.
Our approach might sound familiar but keep in mind that we are fund accountants solving software, not engineers backing into fund accounting. We think that gives us an unfair advantage.
How we’re doing it
We are building a next generation fund administrator using the principles outlined below and the following framework: Treat our team well so they treat our clients well.
What’s in a name? A lot. In physics, a force is represented by a vector. We want our company to have an underlying force of improvement embedded in its culture. We want our team to always be improving. Improve the quality of our deliverables, workflows, software, training program — everything. We take process and workflow engineering seriously and are always looking for ways to remove, automate or refine processes.
Taking care of our team
Above all else, we want to create an inspiring and fun place to work. I feel fortunate that anyone would choose to work for an organization that I lead and I do not take that for granted. I work for my employees, not the other way around.
Our organizational structure is flat so that our team can affect change quickly. We will be solving real-world problems that will have big impact. I want any team member to be able to get a hold of me any time.
We want our team to participate in the economic success of Vector. Our goal is to compensate our team the most that we can, not the least. We will be giving equity grants where we can to align the company’s success with that of our team.
We respect each other’s time. Every minute spent at work is a minute not spent with loved ones or enjoying life. We have no time for unnecessary meetings and the collateral damage they cause to your day. Egos need to be kept in check, nobody is above any job, this includes me. I never ask my team to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself.
We take staffing seriously. Our engagements are staffed in a way that creates operational efficiencies and gives opportunities for team members to become experts in their respective niches.
Finally, we have designed our software to be a joy to use. It’s intuitive, snappy, beautiful and has many time saving features and functionality. Our software was not designed to replace the CPA but, instead, celebrate them by making their workflows efficient and effective.
Taking care of our clients
A company is just a group of people executing a mission. If we execute well on hiring and retaining the best talent and combine that with an industry-leading training program, we’ll provide the best client experience in the industry. We will secure our margins through operational efficiencies rather than through pricing or alienating our employees.
We are excited to deploy client facing modules of our software that will give clients unprecedented access to their data. Over time we will be adding functionality and features as we discover their needs — we have some amazing ideas that we can’t wait to share.
Join us!
If the above resonates with you, join the team, become a client, or follow us as we execute our mission.
We will be posting regular articles on various platforms. We respect your time so our goal is to ensure that what we share is informative, interesting or value-add. Follow us to stay in the loop.
All the best,
Matt
