We recently spoke with Brandon Rembe, Juniper Square's Chief Solutions Officer, to discuss how he and his teams approach innovation and product development for the private funds industry. Rembe reflected on the current challenges shaping the private markets, shared Juniper Square’s vision for a more efficient future for this industry, and provided insight into how the company is making that future a reality.
Q: What changes have you seen in the private markets recently?
A: One major shift we have seen in recent years is the demand for private funds in wealth management. Fifteen to twenty years ago, the allocation to alternatives in most high-net-worth portfolios was nearly zero. But now we’re seeing these assets creep up and account for 5, 10, sometimes even 15-20% of high- and ultra-high-net-worth portfolios. And we're seeing more competition as more GPs enter this space and more LPs seek higher allocations to alternatives.
However, there are still barriers to meeting the demand. Private markets today are where public markets were 30-40 years ago: without purpose-built technology to support them, the number of people needed to operate these funds and the costs involved perpetuate the high overhead that has historically limited access to this market.
An example of this inefficiency—one of our largest clients, who has one of the biggest IT budgets in the business, admitted that, before Juniper Square, it took about three weeks to pull information from their many systems, clean it up, and compile a basic report showing an investor’s positions and fund performance.
As alternatives continue to grow, GPs are realizing that they need better solutions to streamline their operations and expand the pool of investors who can participate.
Q: How is Juniper Square working to make a more efficient private market a reality?
A: We want GPs to focus on their strengths—partnering with their LPs and delivering returns—so they can meet the growing demand for private investments. To that end, we’re constantly assessing what solutions could have the greatest impact.
We’ve been solving problems unique to the private markets, building technology to automate or enhance workflows across investor management, fundraising and onboarding, and fund administration. But it’s important to recognize that transforming the private markets doesn’t come down to technology alone. You can’t forget about the people.
There's that Steve Jobs metaphor claiming that the most efficient animal on earth is a person on a bicycle and that a computer is a bicycle for the brain. It's always this combination of the person and the technology that creates the best outcome. Our approach is to make our fund accountants more effective through better access to data and insights so that they can be better thought partners for our clients. Good technology elevates the team and the outcomes.
This came up recently in a conversation with Wesley Wilson, the CFO at Avanath, and he said it perfectly: "Technology...has become a great enhancer to the financial services industry. It will never replace people, but it will bring greater control. It will bring transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in a way that people alone cannot.”
Q: With the private markets changing so quickly, how does your team ensure Juniper Square’s solutions evolve alongside GPs' needs?
A: One of our core values is to build customer trust, and our customers are our thought partners. We are constantly on-site with them, understanding their pain points and listening to their feedback. Often it’s the little things that come out of those conversations that have an outsized impact. For example, something as simple as recovering a password seamlessly for an LP or making document retrieval more efficient can mean someone doesn't have to stay in the office until 10 pm, or the team can impress investors by sending out reporting a few days early.
Part of building customer trust means creating solutions for the entire industry. We remember the old Henry Ford adage, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would ask for a faster horse.” While we try to partner with each of our clients individually, we also need to look into the future to understand where technology is going and how it will evolve, leveraging game-changing technologies and leading our clients to great outcomes in addition to listening to what they need today.
A great example of that is AI. We want our customers to benefit from all the things that AI is great at today, like document scraping and data normalization, but we also want to be proactive in exploring how it could transform the industry in a couple of years. How can we use AI to streamline LP onboarding? How could AI improve data reconciliation in our fund admin business? That’s the line that we have to walk as we balance delivering short-term results with long-term innovation.
Q: What are you hearing from customers today?
A: One topic that comes up repeatedly is data management. Many of our clients find themselves juggling multiple disparate systems. They have one or many GL systems, reporting and email systems, CRMs, and a separate client portal. And they want to know how to streamline their workflows and get data from point A to point B with minimal clicks.
Even for the largest GPs, the cost of creating and maintaining integrations between these systems is prohibitive. So, more and more GPs are looking to consolidate everything under a single system, and that’s what Juniper Square excels at. GPs shouldn’t have to be data or BI experts. We want our customers to be able to focus on delivering value for their LPs and let Juniper Square and other technology vendors fill in the gaps.
Q: When your team is building solutions to these problems, how do you know you’re hitting the mark?
A: Before we start working on any new feature, we’re scrupulous about making sure that it aligns with our overall goals and contributes to a future where more GPs and LPs engage in private markets. We aim to accelerate that future as much as possible.
More technically, we want to ensure that each feature enhancement or new product solves the problem it was designed for. We build clear measurements into the product documentation, often based on customer outcomes. For example, did we reduce investor onboarding time from 20 minutes to five minutes? Can we reduce our quarter-end close SLA by X days? We also ensure our solutions don't create downstream issues or affect the performance of other parts of the platform.
Our goal is ultimately to make investment management more efficient and scalable for GPs, so measuring the impact on our customers' everyday workflows helps us know that we’re making progress.