Transforming family office operations with Eton Solutions: Shade Tree Advisors’ AI journey

The problem

Shade Tree processes thousands of custodian statements each month.  The documents come from two dozen custodians, and processing requires several steps, including retrieval, renaming, and extraction of key metadata, including the client relationship, entity, month, and month-end market value. From end-to-end, this process could take upwards of 8 minutes per statement and frequently led to bottlenecks.

Understanding that the manual processes could be more streamlined, Shade Tree Advisors sought a solution.

The (Eton) Solution

To address the inefficiencies and enhance scalability, Shade Tree implemented the EtonAI™ Document Intelligence Platform.  This innovative solution introduced context-aware automation, significantly minimizing the need for human intervention. Several compelling factors drove the decision to partner with Eton Solutions:

Established, trusted relationship: Shade Tree had already partnered with Eton Solutions on other aspects of their business, allowing them to “plug in” immediately rather than starting from scratch.

World-class AI expertise: By leveraging Eton’s dedicated AI team, Shade Tree gained access to seasoned prompt engineers and data scientists who could deliver meaningful, turn-key solutions.

Speed to market: Thanks to the groundwork Eton had laid, Shade Tree became one of the earliest multi-family offices to roll out AI, avoiding the typical delays and resource constraints of a greenfield implementation.

Balanced data approach: Eton Solutions had already architected a way to keep sensitive client data fully confidential and proprietary, while still permitting enrichment from open-internet sources to improve AI accuracy.

“Adopting EtonAI and creatively incorporating it into our process has proven highly successful. We began by utilizing EtonAI to read PDF documents, extract the data and leverage the information. By prioritizing high-touch, low-risk tasks, we have established a solid baseline of experience and trust in both the process of implementing AI workflows and the resulting data. This approach has positioned us well to further expand our use cases and continue leveraging AI to optimize our day to day tasks.”-Meghan Grayson, Director of Operations, Shade Tree Advisors.

The results

Below are some of the results and measurable benefits for Shade Tree:

• Custodian account statements: Processing time decreased significantly from over 8 minutes per statement to under 2 minutes, resulting in an ~80% reduction in overall effort. In addition, the automated solution consistently operates at an accuracy level exceeding 97%, with the remaining 3% identified and segregated for manual processing.
• Tax document renaming: Seeing the success of the custodian statement initiative, Shade Tree automated the renaming process for thousands of 1099s and K-1 forms, again with over 90% accuracy. This has saved hundreds of hours annually.
• Credit card coding (in progress): Again, seeing the success of other initiatives, Shade Tree has begun the process of leveraging EtonAI to aid in the processing and coding of client credit card statements.

Conclusion

Shade Tree Advisors’ experience emphasizes the significant advantages of integrating extensive industry knowledge with a secure, scalable, and adaptive AI framework.  Eton Solutions implemented a carefully designed AI strategy addressing the unique challenges of multi-family office management.  At the same time, Microsoft Azure furnished the strong cloud infrastructure necessary to operationalize that strategy effectively. This collaboration has been instrumental in achieving substantial enhancements in efficiency. Notably, the processing time for custodian account statements decreased significantly.

Moreover, the smooth merging of Eton’s proprietary document intelligence and knowledge graph technologies with Azure’s comprehensive suite of AI, security, and monitoring solutions has reduced inefficiencies and facilitated quick deployment. This successful implementation not only enhances operations for Shade Tree Advisors but also illustrates a viable avenue for other multi-family offices aiming to use AI for transformative improvements across the industry.

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