Private capital boosts productivity with automation of complex accounting processes

New York and London, 15 November, 2022 – Private capital’s net asset value has grown more than sevenfold since the early 2000s—twice as fast as public equities—according to McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Review. Because of this, private capital firms need to increase productivity, efficiency and product delivery—but the demands of the market are outpacing their ability to respond using legacy infrastructure.

To address this need for increased productivity, private capital firms, along with the entire financial services industry, are expected to shift at least half of their business to the cloud over the next five years. GFT has partnered with LemonEdge to support private capital firms in this journey, which will see the seamless integration of LemonEdge’s accounting platform into private capital firms’ existing infrastructures. LemonEdge’s technology is designed to support the unique and varied requirements of the private capital industry at scale and across asset classes.

The out-of-the-box accounting solution is complemented by the first cloud-native, low-code platform for the private capital industry. It has attracted investment from Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, and Lauren laslovits, co-founder of Investran, who now serves as a LemonEdge advisor.

Marco Santos, CEO USA and Latin America at GFT, said, “It’s clear that private capital firms are ready to move on from legacy systems that can’t keep up with today’s rate of innovation. GFT has a long track record of partnering with banks, insurers and other financial companies on their journey to the cloud. Our relationship with LemonEdge is a natural extension of this work into the private capital space, which is overdue for transformation.”

Private capital’s growth outpaces firms’ ability to deliver

LemonEdge not only enables firms to keep up with the market, but gives them an advantage over competitors by digitalizing complex accounting procedures. Compared to traditional private capital technologies, the platform is 20x faster to develop custom capabilities.

Putting decades of data to work

Despite its benefits, the time and cost associated with cloud migration still pose challenges to legacy companies—especially private capital pioneers that have decades of client data stored across various third-party systems and spreadsheets.

GFT will enable firms to integrate this data with LemonEdge’s modern platform by centralizing all accounting data, trade data and capital structures. As a result, users will be able to complete complex portfolio management tasks that used to take weeks in a matter of seconds.

Jamie Nascimento, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at LemonEdge, comments, “The true value of any platform is optimized through successful integration into an existing business ecosystem and culture. Together with GFT, we’re able to optimize the deployment of LemonEdge for companies to drive increased competitiveness in an increasingly complex market.”

A partnership trifecta for GFT

The partnership with LemonEdge completes a trifecta of cloud migration partnerships for GFT. The company is Thought Machine’s largest implementation partner. Together they drive digital transformation for the world’s leading banks. It’s also an Advantage-level partner for Guidewire, the P&C platform that supports the entire insurance lifecycle for insurers in 38 countries.

“There is currently a mindset among traditional industries that transformation is a nearly impossible undertaking. Rather than feed into this hesitation, we’re bringing the private capital industry into a new reality with LemonEdge that will ultimately build infrastructures that scale with them into the future,” added Santos.