Four made-in-Canada tools for the growing family office

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As family offices grow, so does their need for sophisticated technologies to monitor and manage data, financial and otherwise.

Here are four made-in-Canada solutions that have emerged to fulfill those needs.

FutureVault

As the name suggests, FutureVault is a digital storage service that allows individuals, families or institutions to consolidate their digital records and assets securely.

“We are both a B2B2C [business-to-business-to-consumer], white-label financial solution and a provider of single-family-office digital vaults,” says G. Scott Paterson, co-founder and executive chairman of FutureVault Inc., which is based in Toronto.

Paterson conceived FutureVault in 2015 when he personally experienced financial setbacks due to avoidable administrative oversights, such as misfiled leases. His epiphany came when he realized there was a need not just for online storage but for “personal life-management digital vaults.” He looked at leading family office managers, such as Grayhawk Wealth, as candidates that would benefit from his platform. Indeed, Grayhawk became a customer this year. 

Each vault holds essential records, from monthly statements to tax records to prescriptions, passports and wills. Paterson believes that in the near future everyone will have a personal vault, which will be as valuable to the unhoused person accessing their identity documents through a fingerprint scan as to the high-net-worth individual using it to keep track of investments.

“Individuals can have a FutureVault-branded experience, or, if they have a family logo or identity, they can use that,” Paterson says.

One of the firm’s U.S. patents handles “permissioning,” he says, explaining that access to the vault can be granted to advisors and regulators, eliminating the need for in-person site visits to verify documents. “Permissioning technology is very, very powerful,” he says, adding that FutureVault’s security level is rated as SOC 2 Type 2, “the highest level of security rating you can obtain.”

Paterson believes this is the birth of a new industry that will also come to include corporate life-management vaults for businesses. FutureVault is compatible with Salesforce, PureFacts, DocuSign, Zephyr and other platforms. Aligned Capital Partners, part of CI Financial, has integrated FutureVault into its client interface.

Paterson sees his company attaining global scale as more businesses sign up.

Global Manager Research Inc.

Global Manager Research is a 20-year-old data aggregator based in Oakville, Ont., that produces investment reports on the performance of institutional and high-net-worth funds.

“Our niche is Canadian institutional funds,” says GMR president Craig Harrison. “We track about 300 money managers and 2,500 to 3,000 funds.”

As a third-party independent data source, GMR helps users mitigate risk and make informed decisions.

“At the most basic level, we provide a check-and-balance system. Most money managers would say the same thing: we want to be represented accurately. We’re adding transparency and accountability,” Harrison says.

“If a family office is still small, they’re using Excel data sheets. As they get mature enough as an organization – handling $50 million, $60 million, $100 million – they need to be mitigating risk,” he says.

Among the various reports that GMR produces is its Institutional Performance Report (IPR), which examines traditional products such as equities and fixed income, drawing from up to 10 years of historical returns and using nine key risk metrics to rank information from more than 300 investment managers through 20 distinct investment universes.

The quarterly Alternatives Performance Report (APR) is similar but tracks non-traditional products in six investment categories (Credit Focused, Equity Focused, Multi-Strategy, Market Neutral, Real Assets and Private Credit). It provides up to five years of historical performance and key risk metrics on more than 175 funds.

The reports are distributed free of charge to family offices; money managers pay to receive them. GMR has the capacity to build custom reports for users, and “if they want to go to the next level and they want the ability to create benchmarking, they can obtain database access and they can perform their own analysis,” Harrison says.

Wealthica

The investment-management tool Wealthica was born in 2015, when Montreal entrepreneur and investor Martin Leclair noticed a gap in the fintech sector – he realized that no digital tool available would allow him to monitor all his assets and their changing values via a single portal.

Leclair began to develop the tool that would become Wealthica “once he understood that there wasn’t a product for what he needed, and started to roll it out for the do-it-yourself retail investors,” says Billy Kawasaki, general manager for Wealthica Financial Technologies Inc. in Montreal.

Leclair was joined in 2019 by co-founder Eric Lemieux, previously a senior executive at Desjardins and Finance Montreal. He had dreamt of having a 360-degree dashboard that would help advisors give better advice and offer the right product to clients.

“Now, it’s a reality with our Wealthica Business Solutions,” Lemieux says. Today, Wealthica has more than 60,000 users and has engaged $26 billion in assets tracked.

Wealthica is primarily Canadian, with extensive coverage of Canadian institutions, but it also offers support for major U.S. institutions and cryptocurrency. Users connect directly to all their accounts through the Wealthica dashboard instead of their financial institutions or brokerage accounts. Wealthica is available on the web or through a mobile app on iOS and Android.

“One of the most interesting parts for family offices is that it facilitates communication between the advisor and client,” says Kawasaki. “It becomes a self-service portal for the advisor and investor, and clients can log into the dashboard and pull reports out for themselves.” It can also simplify succession planning by allowing users to assign various securities to different groups.

Wealthica rolled out the second iteration of its consumer-facing dashboard last year and says it will follow up with a new version for its white-label clients that will seamlessly display the net worth of all their clients.

MeetAmi

When it comes to digital assets, Hashim Mitha, CEO of Vancouver-based MeetAmi Innovations Inc., is looking beyond cryptocurrency.

“Family offices have broader access to different types of investment products now, especially around real estate, private equity and so on,” he says. “As tokenized versions of these become available, they are becoming more interesting for family offices.”

Tokenized assets take the form of secure, tradable digital tokens that represent all or a fraction of a real-life asset.

Mitha co-founded MeetAmi in 2020 with Sarah Morton originally to address blockchain and cryptocurrencies. They saw high-net-worth investors using over-the-counter tools and envisioned more specialized platforms to educate advisors and allow them to access the full gamut of digital investment products. MeetAmi’s flagship product, AmiPro, enables advisors to buy, sell and store a variety of digital assets directly.

“There are tokenized mines, water projects, even trees to capture carbon credits. Fundamentally, things will be in digital form, and we’re building the tools to allow those assets to be accessed by family offices and wealth advisors,” Mitha says, adding that younger investors are particularly receptive to these new products.

Mitha and Morton also realized there was a need for educational resources in the digital arena.

“With AmiPro, we had tremendous interest from advisors and family offices, but they actually didn’t understand what we were talking about,” he says. “So we realized the need to build an educational platform to educate investment advisors and asset managers.” The result was AmiLearn, a subscription-based learning platform that provides free and paid educational content related to digital assets.

On April 20, MeetAmi announced that its AmiLearn platform will be available through the Morningstar Advisor Workstation, a popular web-based platform that helps financial advisors manage client portfolios and access market data. MeetAmi also offers an executive consulting arm called AmiServices and plans to launch a digital-asset product listing called AmiShelf.

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