Post the 2008 financial crisis, families started spreading their assets across multiple entities and jurisdictions to preserve and diversify their wealth. As a result, today’s family offices typically hold multiple currencies, numerous bank accounts, and a wide range of investments across public and private asset classes.
Capturing and consolidating all this data takes a considerable amount of time and manual effort, and families frequently end up making financial decisions with incomplete information.
Solving for family offices
Today, most family offices use simple accounting software tools. However, the problem with existing platforms is that they often miss the context from a family office’s perspective. A simple example is that an account created to hold cash flows for real estate holdings is not the same as a checking account. In other words, from a family office’s perspective, that is not really cash available for the family to use.
“There’s a big difference in how a family looks at their assets versus how financial institutions report them on a balance sheet.” – Chirag Nanavati, Managing Director at Asset Vantage.
In a search for an integrated software platform that could address this issue, a family office founded in 1973 saw that existing platforms built for institutions could only provide reporting on assets managed by them. However, they fell short when it came to viewing their total exposure across all advisors, banks/custodians, asset classes, etc.
To solve their own problem and offer other global family offices a solution, they founded Asset Vantage (AV) in 2011. AV is an integrated cloud-based accounting and performance reporting family office software. It acts as a financial engine, pulling data from multiple electronic and manual sources. “The platform picks the underlying transactions and cash flows and brings up true investment performance reporting from a customer’s perspective, and not from a bank’s perspective,” says Chirag Nanavati.
Delivering instant financial insights
In serving hundreds of family offices and their advisors over the past decade, AV found that families accumulate a lot of information and data across complex entities and accounts. Having perfected automated standard accounting and reporting software to generate weekly, monthly, or quarterly in easy-to-digest formats, they ventured into AI.
“Current AI technology has the potential to automate work activities that absorb most of the family office employees’ time today.” – Chirag Nanavati, Managing Director at Asset Vantage.
Driven by a culture of continuous learning and a passion for solving challenges, AV launched AV EDGE. Powered by AI and Natural Language Processing, AV EDGE empowers users to query their own financial data alongside market information and receive instant responses in plain English, as opposed to logging into a system and running filters to find the specific data requested.
How it works
Designed to save clients a significant amount of time, AV EDGE improves the experience of traversing a complex underlying web of accounts and investments.
Similar to using ChatGPT, clients can type specific questions into a chat interface. For example, “what is my cash balance”? Or “how much are my expenses across my real estate properties for the past year”?
AV EDGE then picks up the data points from the integrated accounting and performance platform and serves them up instantly.
Screenshots of AV EDGE
Key features
- Natural Language Processor: Clients can engage with the system using everyday language to get financial data on demand. AV EDGE takes the complexity and then breaks it down into specific micro-interactions that clients need.
- Integrated accounting and performance reporting system: Because AV EDGE is built on top of an integrated accounting and performance reporting system, there is a single source of truth to the data that can be viewed at any point in time.
- Instant insight: AV EDGE empowers clients with immediate access to data insights that were previously time-consuming or required human experts to derive to make better decisions.
- Mobile: Enables access to critical data on the go, ideal for quick queries outside the family office environment.
To sum it all up
For years, family office professionals and their advisors have been called upon to answer clients’ queries —some even going the extra mile by drawing up specialised reports to address certain investment accounts. Leveraging AI-driven natural language processing, AV EDGE aims to offer family offices a solution to deliver instant financial insights, enhancing their efficiency and enabling better decision-making.
“Over time, AV Edge will keep getting more powerful as it learns and picks up the underlying data’s strength with a wider suite of interactions, allowing clients to get to their data faster and set up specific alerting and monitoring around specific data points that the client cares about,” says Nanavati.
About Asset Vantage
Asset Vantage was founded in 2011 by a family office and technology group as a next-generation, cloud and mobile-based asset management, accounting and reporting system catering to the complex financial needs of customers ranging from individual wealth holders to fully staffed family offices and professionals that service them. AV serves hundreds of single-family offices, multifamily offices, and CPA firms across North America, the Middle East, and India.”
