Archway and Canoe Forge Path to Further Advance Alts Data Management for Family Offices Using the Archway Platform

Since 2020, collaboration and a desire to solve complex financial problems have been at the core of Archway and Canoe Intelligence’s strategic partnership. Throughout the years, Archway’s experience working with nearly 600 ultra-high-net-worth families through the Archway Platform has made them acutely familiar with the challenges family offices face when it comes to collecting and reporting on alternative investment data.

Coupled with Canoe’s innovation and vision in the alts technology space, where the Canoe platform covers 42,000 active funds across $8T in Assets Under Management or Advisement for its 325 alternative investor clients, our teams knew early on there was an immense opportunity to streamline alternative investment data management within the family office space.

Recently, the two teams have been working on the next iteration of our partnership as we develop a more robust integration between the Canoe and Archway platforms.

This integration between Canoe and Archway automates the transmission of private equity and hedge fund valuations, as well as Private Equity Call and Distribution data. Moreover, Hedge Fund subscriptions and redemptions extracted from Canoe can be effortlessly imported into Archway.

In this article, we share how the two technologies are teaming up to test and build this expanded integration—and how we believe it can level up the operational efficiency for our mutual family office clients.

Common Challenges in Alts Data Management

Alternative investors, particularly family offices, navigate a complex landscape fraught with challenges when it comes to managing alts data. Among these challenges are data silos, where crucial information is scattered across multiple systems and platforms, making it difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of investments. Additionally, the reliance on manual data entry introduces a significant risk of human error and inefficiency, consuming valuable time and resources.

Compounding these issues is the lack of standardized data formats, further complicating the integration and analysis of disparate data sources.

In response to these challenges, Archway Family Office Services and Canoe Intelligence are expanding their strategic partnership and integration methods. By automating data transmission and ensuring data consistency, the integration streamlines the process of accessing and integrating alts data. This not only enhances operational efficiency but also mitigates the risk of errors, empowering family offices to make informed decisions with confidence.

How Canoe Enhances Archway’s Platform

• Automated Fund and Allocation-Level Data Extraction: Canoe's integration with the Archway Platform facilitates automated extraction, validation, and delivery of fund and allocation-level data.
• Pricing Updates: Canoe seamlessly updates pricing information in Archway, providing alternative investment valuation data extracted as soon as received and processed.
• Effortless Management of Capital Calls and Distributions: Canoe automates the process of updating Archway with capital call and distribution transactions.
• Streamlined Subscription and Redemption Transactions: Canoe generates extracts of subscription or redemption transactions, which can be uploaded directly to Archway.

Archway’s Platform at a Glance

Archway's Platform serves as a comprehensive wealth management technology solution tailored specifically for family offices. With Archway, family offices gain access to a wide range of benefits, including a 360-degree view of clients' wealth, enhanced operational efficiency, improved data accuracy and reliability, and robust operational and client reporting.

Bringing the Integration to Life

Prior to launching beta testing for the integration in late 2023, the Archway and Canoe teams worked in concert to automate data flows, normalize values, and define accounting rules and transaction mapping across systems.

The teams collaborated on extensive internal testing to validate the effectiveness and reliability of the integration, with the intent to not only automate the transmission of alternative asset data between platforms, but to simplify the complex nature of accounting for alternative investment transactions.

Through rigorous analysis and learning, the team identified and addressed potential challenges, fine-tuning the integration to meet the unique needs and requirements of family offices.

Now in its beta testing phase, the team continues to collect invaluable real-world perspectives, helping to guide iterative improvements and ensuring alignment with client expectations.

To date, Canoe has processed 150,000+ documents on behalf of Archway’s clients. Additionally, this collaborative effort has positioned two dozen mutual clients to automate the transmission of data across 3,400+ alternative investments, underscoring the substantial impact of the integration on operational efficiency and data management accuracy.

What's Coming Next

Looking ahead, Archway and Canoe are finalizing the initial integration offering with plans to expand the universe of data available to mutual clients seeking to automate the transmission of their alternative asset data. This next phase promises to unlock new levels of efficiency and value for family offices leveraging the combined power of the Archway’s Platform and Canoe Intelligence.

As Archway continues to leverage Canoe's capabilities, clients can expect further enhancements that drive continued scale and elevate client satisfaction. With a commitment to innovation and excellence, Archway and Canoe are poised to shape the future of alts data management. Stay tuned for more updates as the integration nears launch later this year.

Disclaimer: All statistics as of March 31, 2024.

Originally published by Canoe Intelligence.

A New Way to Synthesize, Visualize, and Analyze Family Office Data

With reporting at the center of nearly every family office software buying decision, the Archway Platform has offered a robust suite of reporting tools since its earliest days.

Launching with a raw database export capability, a handful of in-app performance visualizations, and roughly two dozen statement-style reports, the Archway Platform’s reporting foundation was set out of the gates.

Within the first five years of being on the market, the solution’s feature set quickly grew to include over 40 distinct reporting options.

By 2009, the Archway Platform featured more than 90 reports within its standard report library and users were first introduced to the concept of dynamic dashboards for quick, on-screen consumption of data. In 2012, the platform’s first standalone client portal application, dubbed FOIL, was released.

Over the course of the next decade, the standard report library ballooned to more than 200 parameter-driven reports, thousands of queries were built, dozens of dashboard inserts were rolled out, data grid customization was implemented throughout the application, and the Archway Client Portal was further enhanced to be an on-demand, mobile reporting tool for end-clients and family members.

Together, the Archway Platform’s standard report library, data queries, dashboards, custom data grids, and client portal served as a powerful, multi-faceted reporting engine.

But with an eye towards innovation, it was always clear that reporting is a function of our solution that can constantly be built upon: More metrics, more insights, more flexibility.

And so, in 2023, we introduced the Archway Platform’s report composer tool.

A unique, interactive reporting experience, the report composer functionality allows family offices to comprehensively analyze their enterprise data in a user-driven, self-service manner. Both elegant and powerful, the latest tool in the Archway Platform’s reporting suite grants nontechnical users the ability to create bespoke data views that deliver better insights and better reporting outputs for their needs.

Pulling from the Archway Platform’s vast database, family offices can assemble custom reports using raw data related to accounts payable, general ledger detail, investor activity, transactions, open positions, alternative assets, and other financial information.

But perhaps most important: The tool is inherently designed with versatility in mind. Featuring a drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build and edit custom reports in real-time, the report composer allows users to add, remove, and reorder data points—all without coding or custom development. And since the tool is embedded directly within the Archway Platform, users can dynamically group, sort, and filter their data based on their existing user-defined data classifications.

Using visualizations and charting tools like pie, bar, and line charts, users can further transform their data into meaningful analytics that help tell a story of trends, comparisons, and measurements.

Although a sophisticated reporting tool by nature, the Archway Platform’s report composer capability offers family offices yet another reporting mechanism built on the principle of simplexity: A simple interface that allows users to access and synthesize complex financial data on demand.

The report composer tool serves an important role in how family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families compile, communicate, and analyze their clients’ financial information, and seamlessly complements the existing suite of Archway Platform reporting capabilities.

Interested in seeing the report composer in action? Request a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team to schedule your live tour of the Archway Platform.

How Family Offices Use the Archway Platform℠ to Create Bespoke Client Reports

Every family office professional understands the necessity of balance sheets and income statements: They serve a fundamental purpose in understanding an individual’s financial position. And, fortunately, there are many family office software and service providers that can produce them.

But conventional financial statements rarely provide the level of insight needed to fully satisfy bespoke client requests.

As you’ve likely encountered, assembling non-traditional reports often requires unique attributes or classifications, custom data groupings, and client-specific data points. Moreover, if the request involves uncommon assets or personalized investment frameworks, compiling the data can require a heavy lift.

In our 20+ years working with family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families, we’ve received plenty of unique reporting requests, and we know how important it is to present complex—sometimes irregular—investment data in a simple, yet meaningful report.

Combining the robustness of the Archway Platform’s reporting engine with the flexibility of its user-defined data attributes and classifications, we’ve had the opportunity to help our clients harness the power of the platform to craft creative, tailored reporting outputs for their end-clients.

Whether you’re interested in building a report that compares household expenses across multiple properties, analyzes clean energy investments, or summarizes artwork valuations, the Archway Platform’s 200+ standard reports and multi-pronged reporting capabilities can help you quickly produce an easy-to-consume report.

Here are five unique reports, built using the Archway Platform, that break the boundaries of traditional family office reporting and deliver creative, tailored financial insights.

Inspiration #1. Paintings by historical era.

While it’s well known that artwork is a commonly held asset amongst family offices, the asset type tends to lack influence and inclusion in the development of family office technology and reporting standards. But given its prominence in high-net-worth investment portfolios, artwork—like any other asset—deserves specialized reporting.

Using the Archway Platform’s flexible, parameter-driven reporting templates, users can customize the view to see purchase price, change in market value, and unrealized gains / losses across the owner’s fine art collection. Perhaps more importantly, they can create custom attributes such as artist, historical era, region of origin, or art consultant—ultimately, allowing family offices to create a wholly unique way to consume artwork-related financial insights.

Inspiration #2. Profit comparison by horse.

Perhaps not as widely held as fine art, thoroughbred racing talent still requires an impressive amount of asset management. Leveraging the Archway Platform’s ability to create a fully customized general ledger, family offices can categorize and group expenses, measure their costs against equestrian-generated income, and compare profits across horses with simplicity and ease.

Inspiration #3. Primary residence expenses.

When you operate multiple households or properties, it can be difficult to compile the various expenses associated with each location. Spanning across utility and tax bills to insurance, property upkeep, and household staff payroll costs, it’s critical to know how much money is being spent on each property.

Using custom general ledger accounts and flexible reporting templates, family offices can succinctly compare property ownership costs across multi-level, user-defined expense categories.

Inspiration #4. Rental property income.

Like personal properties, many family offices hold a variety of rental properties. As a result, from time to time, you may be asked how much rental income is being generated—and which property is earning the most.

Using a combination of customized general ledger accounts and property-based portfolios, the Archway Platform’s reporting suite allows users to quickly produce a consolidated net income report that displays revenue and general operating expenses by individual rental property.

Inspiration #5. Impact report.

New investment frameworks—whether generally accepted or internally developed—are routinely popping up in the family office arena. Having the flexibility to infinitely tag assets with unique attributes gives family office professionals the opportunity to slice-and-dice data in line with the overarching investment strategy.

Using the Archway Platform’s multi-level grouping mechanisms, you can take multiple frameworks, such as foreign investment allocation laid over the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, to present a unique view of investment impact across regions, areas of development, and environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

To learn more about how the Archway Platform’s powerful reporting engine can help your family office deliver tailored financial insights, check out a demo or schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team.

Evaluating Family Office Platforms for Specialty, Efficiency, and Connectivity

As a family office software provider, we talk about technology evaluations, well, a lot.

And when we talk about technology evaluations, it’s important to note that the conversation isn’t limited to prospective users and industry consultants trying to better understand our offering.

In fact, the most constant tech evaluation the team here at Archway Family Office Services participates in is the one we conduct ourselves: an ongoing assessment of how we can improve the Archway Platform and the private wealth management operations it supports.

But if you aren’t a technology provider to hundreds of family offices and financial institutions, this may not be a routine activity for you, which likely has you asking the question, “When should I reevaluate my family office technology?”

Here are three signs that it may be time to revisit your family office tech strategy.

Your technology is designed for the masses, but not for family offices.

Out-of-the-box general ledger, portfolio management, and performance reporting solutions work extremely well for out-of-the-box scenarios—scenarios of which family offices rarely encounter.

Common pain points family offices may experience with non-specialized technology include:

• Entity consolidations
• Partnership accounting
• Nested ownership calculations
• Centralized disbursements and bill payment
• Enhanced investment analytics
• Complex, multi-pronged transactions
• Net worth and financial report creation

If your family office has found itself experiencing one of the above challenges, it may be a good time to research purpose-built family office solutions—or, at the very least, engage with a consultant that can point you in the right direction.

If your family office has found itself experiencing many of the above challenges, it’s an even better time.

Despite having a technology solution in place, you still predominately rely on manual processes.

Ideally, when you implement a technology platform, your family office will see a negative correlation in manual work: More automation, less human intervention.

But when the solution in place is non-specialized, or simply ill equipped to handle the nuances of ultra-high-net-worth wealth, family office professionals may find themselves doing a significant portion of work outside of the system.

A few manual tasks here and there certainly isn’t enough to move the needle, but if you find that you are routinely performing manual rework in other applications, moving data to spreadsheets, writing physical checks, or building financial reports using presentation slides, it may be time to ask yourself if your current technology solution is serving its intended purpose—or if it’s just collecting digital dust.

Your current technology platform doesn’t connect with outside data providers or third-party systems.

Across industries, it’s generally accepted that technology silos can cause a variety of problems. Aside from clouding transparency and stunting collaboration, technology silos can prove to be a massive drain on efficiency. Often requiring duplicative data entry, technology silos at best waste resources, and at worst open the door to data discrepancies and risk across systems.

But technology silos and multiple systems don’t need to be synonymous. There can be immense value in selecting modern family office platforms that are able to communicate by securely passing relevant data to and from one another—whether through automated data feeds, APIs, or customizable data extracts and queries.

To that end, if your current family office tech stack lacks the ability to automatically collect data from multiple sources, integrate data across multiple systems, or produce comprehensive reporting, it may be worth reviewing the technology solutions that are preventing your family office from breaking down those verticals.

If your family office has seen the signs and is interested in revisiting your current tech stack, check out our simple wealthtech strategy evaluation to help you think through and build your organization’s long-term technology strategy.

A Look at 4 Key Areas of Strategic Focus Expected in 2023

As the end of the year looms near, so do project deadlines, final data reviews, and annual reporting deliverables. With family offices bogged down by the mechanics of reconciliations and closing the year-end books, strategic planning can unintentionally get pushed to the bottom of the pile.

But whether strategy is top of mind or not, the family office space is in flux—changing now more than ever—which warrants consideration of several key focus areas.

Outsourcing

Continuing a multi-year conversation, outsourcing has been a trending topic in the market for some time now. With more family offices reviewing internal operations and a growing appetite amongst financial institutions to offer a more holistic set of services to its ultra-high-net-worth clients, we at Archway Family Office Services believe outsourcing will continue to be the centerfold in the ongoing assessment of operations and resources.

Employed as a long-term strategy or as a trusted stopgap during unanticipated events, outsourced services can create meaningful capacity within family offices. Although family office outsourcing is often synonymous with professional services like tax and regulatory compliance or cybersecurity, it can also be impactful in core operational areas like data aggregation and reconciliation, partnership administration, and routine reporting.

Process automation

When the Archway Platform℠ was introduced in the early 2000s, it offered family offices the opportunity to automate the manual ticking and tying of prior decades. It offered automated data aggregation and the creation of financial statements and client reports. It offered automated partnership allocations, investment performance calculations, bill payment, and more. And all of this automation offered family offices something they’d long been after: Time.

Now 20 years later, countless technology solutions have been introduced to automate family office functions from A to Z, each offering a new layer of efficiency—and potentially adding hours back into the work week for family office professionals.

Enhanced analytics

Ultra-high-net-worth investors and next gen wealth owners are clamoring for data. They want more transparency, deeper insights, and a higher probability of success. For family office professionals, this translates into looking beyond traditional performance measurements and delivering enhanced analysis across a variety of metrics and results like attribution, benchmarking, value-at-risk, stress testing, exposure mapping, and what-if scenarios.

Entity and tax restructuring

While most family offices don’t endeavor to restructure every single year, certain events can lead to this conversation taking a front row seat during annual strategic planning. Impending tax laws, new regulations, and political posturing can all lead to an evaluation of a family office’s structure. But so can major changes to the nuclear family like deaths, births, divorces, or marriages.

As family offices and their tax attorneys consider tax advantages and implications, entity restructuring can help families weather the changes—political, social, environmental, or personal.

At Archway Family Office Services, we can’t overstate the importance of having the right family office software in place to manage the restructure, automate asset transfers, define new ownership, and validate the changes through reporting. With the help of the right tools, family offices can make the restructuring process feel nearly seamless—or at least as seamless as restructuring goes.

While it’s likely that your to-do list is long and the countdown to the New Year is short, we encourage family offices and advisors to high-net-worth clients to spend some time reviewing the outcomes of the past year and strategizing for the next.

Debunking common family office software misconceptions

There are plenty of opinions when it comes to family office technology: Integrated versus best of breed, non-specialized versus purpose-built, in-house versus outsourced, IBOR (Investment Book or Records) versus ABOR (Accounting Book of Records). The list goes on.

And given the sheer number of opinions out there, occasionally a mistruth is bound to emerge. To help separate fact from fiction, here are three well-circulated myths about family office technology, and what you can expect instead.

Myth #1: You have to go it alone.

Selecting, implementing, and operating a technology platform can feel like an oversized task for family offices with limited staffing and capacity. Fearing that more sophisticated, purpose-built family office tools will compound resource constraints, it’s not uncommon for family offices to stick with non-specialized, seemingly low-maintenance software.

From their vantage point, without the internal infrastructure or headcount to support the ongoing maintenance of a new system, the likelihood of adoption is low.

Here’s the truth:

Utilizing generic software packages for general ledger, investment data aggregation, partnership accounting, bill payment, and client reporting can actually hinder efficiency. Burdened with manual processes and disconnected technologies that beckon duplicative work, this approach can ultimately require more time to manage than enterprise-level family office software.

On the other hand, it is true that dedicated family office tools are often accompanied by a bit of a learning curve, but the long-term gains in efficiency, dependability, and accuracy can be tremendous.

Technology doesn’t need to be exclusively managed by an organization’s in-house staff.

In many cases, technology vendors offer outsourced services that family offices can leverage to supplement their own staffing. Similarly, family offices can partner with consultants and contractors to assist with upfront technology implementations and offload recurring, resource-heavy operations, like portfolio reconciliation, partnership accounting, and monthly reporting.

By working alongside external teams with operational or technology-specific expertise, family offices can reap the benefits of dedicated family office technology, while lightening the operational load associated with day-to-day data management.

Myth #2: Siloed technology and specialized technology are one in the same.

The wealthtech boom over the past decade introduced a variety of solutions that are hyper focused on specific family office functions—areas like alternative assets, portfolio intelligence, risk analysis, manager due diligence, bill payment, data aggregation, and benchmarking.

With so many options, family offices may find themselves leveraging two, three, five, and sometimes more disparate solutions. Hence the myth that these solutions must live in mutually exclusive silos.

Here’s the truth:

Today’s family office tech stacks are indeed more sophisticated than ever. But family office technology is also displaying unprecedented levels of interconnectivity. From strategic partnerships across firms, like the recently expanded relationship between Archway’s Archway Platform℠ and Canoe Intelligence, to the widespread adoption of APIs, file exchanges, and data warehouses, family offices have an increasingly wide array of options when it comes to integrating their financial data hub.

Myth #3: Technology is an expense, not an investment.

Family office or not, industry-specific technology rarely comes cheap. Built according to the nuanced operations and unique data structures of its user base, purpose-built family office technology comes with a commensurate price tag. But simply because modern wealthtech costs more than legacy systems and spreadsheets, doesn’t mean it’s not worth the price.

Here’s the truth:

Like most things in business, you get what you pay for. And while adopting family office-specific tools comes with a cost, using non-specialized software does too.

Oftentimes undetected, these costs may not come in the form of a price tag on a license agreement, but make no mistake, your family office could be paying in manual rework, duplicative efforts, multi-step data entry, time-consuming consolidations, and labor-intensive reporting.

Meanwhile, investing in purpose-built, process-driven family office solutions can introduce automation, native workflows, validation systems, increased data accuracy, and enhanced reporting, all of which can pay dividends in terms of time and resources.

Which begs the question: What’s that worth to your family office?

Originally authored by Archway for publication on Family Office Exchange.