Solving a more immediate problem - Intermediary Invoicing

Capnetix developed it's first product (Fundix) as an off the shelf, SaaS delivered, configurable record keeping solution for institutional transfer agency.  In bringing this solution to market, we learned a lot about how people think about back office of record keeping technology.  We learned that no matter how great the value Fundix could provide to streamline TA record keeping, improve customer service, lower cost and risk, the hard business fact is, people are not yet ready to think about changing their institutional transfer agency record keeping approach. 

So, what's an innovative company to do?  Well, find a new, bigger problem that's on a lot of people's minds, and solve it for them


In August of 2009, I was invited into a phone call between Hubbard Garber, principal at Barrington Partners, and John Mari, VP - Global Strategy and Business Intelligence for Janus.  During the phone call, John explained the immediate (and large) business problem associated with intermediary fee invoicing.

Without going into the details here (we're working on a whitepaper now to give you all the background information if you're interested), the basic problem is this.

Mutual fund companies (like Janus, Oppenheimer, MFS, Eaton Vance...) pay intermediaries (like Schwab, Merrill Lynch, Ameriprise, Edward Jones) to distribute their funds to end investors.  The problem lies in the way that distributors send invoices to fund companies, how contracts are structured, and how the fund companies have to validate, allocate and pay those invoices. 

The bottom line....it's pretty much all manual, expensive, and full of operational risk for the fund companies.  The people in accounting operations push forward with all manner of custom Excel spreadsheets, but there is significant business pain.  That pain is now affecting C level executives of fund companies, who want to scale their distribution, without scaling cost or risk.

Today, Capnetix is bringing the solution (called InvoiceConnect) to market as a configurable, SaaS delivered record keeping service.  What used to be a manual data handling nightmare, is now highly organized, accessible, and easy to use solution, removing pain from both the fund company executives, as well as the operations people who have much better things to do.

Although Fundix is a fully working solution, ready to go, you will see a shift in the conversation to a more immediate problem for executives, which is how to streamline the handling of intermediary invoices.